by Patrick Pilch (@pratprilch)
What I miss most about gigs is watching a band like Floatie play a lot of different shows to a lot of different crowds and evolve in real time. Floatie had no recorded material before COVID. I would always ask about demos. Nope, no demos. No recorded trace of Floatie until Warm Violet: A Compilation for Chicago Community Jail Support in late 2020. The band’s transitory sets had long functioned as special, had-to-be-there moments for quite some time before the pandemic. Floatie operated in this constant state of unfinalized growth for the better part of their existence, becoming a bigger band, a sharper band, a better-every-time-you-see-them band. Voyage Out is the culmination of these pursuits, an excellent and cohesive collection of skittering “frog rock” enveloped by the quartet’s clever arrangements of balmy six-string bass and twin guitars.
Originally a trio made up of Sam Bern, Joe Olson and Luc Schutz, Floatie added Wil Wisnieski to the mix in summer 2019, and that’s when everything fell into place. The band played Sleeping Village in July and while Floatie-as-a-trio worked just fine, adding synths and an extra axe sealed the deal, buffing the group’s arrangements to their full-fledged potential. The songs on Voyage Out deftly balance Floatie’s punctuated instrumentation and offshore aura, combining and oscillating between spindly math-rock and a cog-like wash of the band’s moving parts. Floatie make the most of entwining these seemingly opposing approaches on the record’s standout bookends—mood-setting opener “Shiny” and highlight closer “Lookfar.”
Voyage Out’s exploratory nature is inspired by adventure novels like The Count of Monte Cristo and Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, both of which respectively inspire the back to back “Castleman” and instrumental “Ode to Shackleton.” “Catch a Good Worm” finds Sam Bern questioning the binary, criticizing the pre established paths which fail to comprehend the spectrum of human expression. “All at once / answering a question / If there are two, / tell me where my place is” the vocalist sings, questioning the true amount of individual agency one possesses when given only two options. It was never just North or South, East or West for Shackleton (okay, maybe a little more South for the Antarctic explorer), but there’s a whole lot in between. Voyage Out is an exploration in itself. The record relishes in experiment and traverses toward understanding, as the band makes strides toward self-assurance and acceptance. The destination has always been out there; it just takes someone to find it.