Liquid Mike – “Groucho Marx” b/w “Selling Swords”

SELF-RELEASED

There was a while where it felt like my life revolved around airports. I was living in Denver, and my girlfriend was out in Brooklyn. I was living in a nice-but-soulless studio apartment; the kind of place with grey wood floorboards, beige walls, and colorless cabinetry. It was fine at first, but after a couple of years, it started to feel like a prison with an Xbox. When my relationship first started, we talked on the phone every night and texted every day, but it was never enough. For all the marvels of modern technology, it turns out there’s no replacing the feeling of being in the same room as the person you love. 

The two of us made a point to visit each other every month or so: she’d come out to visit me, I’d fly out to see her, we’d meet somewhere in the middle for a music festival. It continued like this for a while, and even though the distance was hard, we always felt some shared sense of relief when there was a flight coming up because it meant we got to see each other. After a while, the act of flying started to become oddly comforting. Cramming into the little seats, eating shitty airport food during a delay, trying to watch a movie on the back of someone’s headrest. All of this became part of the ritual we had to go through in order to see each other. 

The upcoming album from Liquid Mike, Hell Is An Airport, hones in on all these infinite gripes and gross realities of modern air travel and turns them into something biblical. Bandleader, guitarist, and vocalist Mike Maple explains, “Airports are these weird, intermediary spaces that have always made me feel like I'm stuck in limbo. Airports are stressful and congested and bureaucratic and never sleep; I imagine hell operates very much like an airport.” 

Even with this apt analogy where DFW might as well be a circle of hell, the music itself is still as bright, sunny, and catchy as ever, crammed with sharp hooks and blistering guitar licks. Much like their last album (expertly reviewed for this site by Elizabeth Handgun), their new collection of songs feels tailor-made for windows-down summertime drives rather than the tense, hurried energy of an airport terminal. Today’s lead singles, “Groucho Marx” and “Selling Swords,” are merely the first taste of the band’s sixth LP. The first is a silver-stringed ripper that barrels out like an out-of-control baggage tractor, while the second is a slightly more laid-back cut with a light breeze of upper-midwestern twang. Ultimately, both songs still default to the same baseline of blast-ahead rock, a beautiful and needed energy in these late days of spring.