When your hopes are high and your goals are set you have either two possible outcomes, the first being absolute jaw-dropping failure or you can break Newton’s Law of Physic, jump out of the window and fly. Maybe this reviewer is heaping a bit too much hyperbolic praise but here goes anyway. Hailing from the heavily populated (both musically and individually) city of Sacramento, California, there lies a small, fairly unheard of musical collective that call themselves A Lot Like Birds.

Ted Bundy's Thanksgiving Dinner, Hallows Or Horcruxes?, When The Wolf Is Counting Sheep.

Now, I don’t know about you readers but this reviewer certainly had quite a laugh at the shear cheesiness of said band name, almost to the point where listening to this album seemed unnecessary, it surely had to be bad. But after procuring their album Plan B, needless to say I was a bit taken aback; I really had no idea what hit me.

Let us begin: I remember hearing/experiencing, for the first time, Circle Takes the Squares album, Undo the Roots. Letro Automatic Filler Manual on this page. Quite honestly I thought it was an absolute mess of an album, it nearly took a full year to even begin to understand what had hit me.

Yet something magical happened at that catalytic moment, that sudden realization that there is something truly special and beautiful to behold in every note and every screamed anecdote taken from that album. While it did not nearly take over a year to finally realize, I have come to the conclusion that Plan B has hit me in such a way that there is no denying there is something truly wonderful about this album.

Stylistically, this group has unknowingly taken a giant leap and has somehow snagged the stars on their way up. One thing that A Lot Like Birds relies heavily on and it felt on the very first track ‘Ted Bundy’s Thanksgiving Dinner’, is the mood setting atmosphere they create. Three members are dedicated to the general setting that is felt on Plan B, those members being rhythm guitarist Michael Franzino, violinist (yes, you heard me right) Athena Koumis and keyboardist Julil Ydell. Every song seems to ebb and flow, corrugating melodies leading into overtly dramatic climaxes that ebb down to mere single guitar chords that are soon brought up again, build up after build up. Every member of the band is used according to their skills and every musical instrument is utilized in such a way that the listener will have to simply pause the song and say to themselves ‘Can it really be this good'’. The Fall of Troy-esque ‘When the Wolf is Counting Sheep’ features spastic skramz style screaming coupled with on-again off-again guitar tapping that will surely cause a listener to consistently be eager as to where what direction they will go in next. The greatest treat of all comes at the end of said track where we are greeted by a sax solo reminiscent to Bomb the Music Industry!