The Falcon - 'Unicornography'

For any established musician, engaging in a side project can be a risky venture. No matter what that second band does, it will almost always be compared to that artist’s main band. Even worse, the side project can sound so much like the main band that its existence seems unnecessary.

Such is the case for The Falcon, side project to Lawrence Arms members Brendan Kelly and Neil Hennessy, as well as Dan Andriano of Alkaline Trio. Fortunately, though the band’s full-length debut, Unicornography, sounds remarkably similar to a Larry Arms album, the music contained therein is so good that it doesn’t matter.

The Falcon is essentially a band started for fun by these three Chicagoans, and it sounds as such throughout. Although Andriano has established himself as a great songwriter with Alkaline Trio, he bows down to the prolific work of Kelly. All 11 tracks of Unicornography carry Kelly’s expertly crafted, bar-punk style.

Album opener “The Angry Cry of the Angry Pie” may catch the listener off-guard, as it is much more blistering than anything recently released from the Trio or the Arms. Kelly’s muscular guitar riff guides the song through a shouting match.

Though the song is much heavier than anything else on the album, it is similar to the other tracks in one respect: the band members don’t entirely take themselves seriously.

First off, just look at the song title. Then consider the song’s opening lines, “You want a piece of me? / I’m like a razor blade / I’m like a pound of blubber smothering a live grenade.” Right away, the listener will realize that The Falcon are sort of tough, but mostly just nonsensical.

“Blackout,” the second track, is much more indicative of the general sound of Unicornography. It’s slightly different from the punk sound of The Lawrence Arms, thanks in part to the presence of acoustic guitar strumming on this and other songs. It’s a decent track, but not nearly good as its successor, “The La-Z-Boy 500.”

“The La-Z-Boy 500” needs to be a single ASAP. It isn’t just sort of catchy; it’s absurdly catchy. The guitar work is just standard punk chords, but Kelly delivers an instantly memorable hook with, “When the bell tolls I’ll be fine / They say that living is a lot like dying.” If Christians can sing “Kumbya” around a campfire, then “The La-Z-Boy 500” was meant for drunken punks camping in the woods.

“The Celebutard Chronicles,” “Little Triggers” and “The Routes We Wander” come even closer to the Larry Arms sound, with throaty and catchy choruses used at a maximum. It isn’t until “The Unicorn Odyssey” that The Falcon present something mildly different from the Larry formula, if only for the incorporation of more dance-oriented drumming from Hennessy.

Kelly manages to get even more bar-band-ready with “R.L. Burnouts Inc.” The song cries out last-call loneliness with lines like, “You never cry in bottles / You cry when you get home / When you watch your life walk out the door / And you fall asleep alone.” It’s “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” in under two-and-a-half minutes.

To dispel the gloom of “R.L. Burnouts Inc.,” the last two tracks of Unicornography pick up the pep. “Building The Even More Perfect Asshole Parade” unleashes some fervor left over from “The Angry Cry of the Angry Pie.” “When I Give the Signal, Run!” caps the album off just short of the half-hour mark with a final salvo of boozy punk.

Unicornography doesn’t necessarily need to exist. The Lawrence Arms and Alkaline Trio have already rocked fans’ faces off with similar-sounding, and better, albums like The Greatest Story Ever Told and Maybe I’ll Catch Fire. But that doesn’t keep Kelly, Andriano and Hennessy from having a good time, and it certainly won’t keep fans of those two bands from loving Unicornography.