It’s a dangerous thing to start equating up and coming local bands with national acts that share similar musical influences and song writing quirks.  I don’t want to start labeling bands “The Pittsburgh Arcade Fire” or “The Pittsburgh Rapture” which I came dangerously close to doing in my last review/preview of the super talented and sexy Big Hurry.  Big Hurry are sole placeholders of their stomping, sensuous sound, and I would never want to accuse a band, a local band for that matter, for mindlessly aping the ideas of a more accomplished artist (unless of course they totally deserved such an accusation).   Also, I would never want our burgeoning, home-grown, stunner of a music scene to slowly turn toward a shallow reflection of the the national independent music community, complete with doppelgangers and demented posers of acts that have entirely too much hype in the first place.

Ball of Flame Shoot Fire, luckily, avoid any casual  labeling with a dynamic, complicated and sprawling sound that is exceedingly difficult, meant fully as a compliment, to nail down as a this or a that. On their debut EP Grumpy Little Bird,  BOFSF exhibited a knack for writing songs that easily oscillated between wittily thoughtful, competent, piano-pop and  apocalyptic anthems complete with absurdist imagery, bouncing carnival rhythms and desperate vocals.  But while that EP was more a collection of demos and aborted styles than a confident artistic statement, their first full-length album, Jokeland (pronounced like Oakland), coalesces the most interesting parts of Grumpy Little Bird into an intricately beautiful and demanding symbiosis of sound.

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