Defending the Indefensible: Aeroplane's Much Maligned 'We Can't Fly' is Actually an Ode to the Joys of Failure

Defending the Indefensible is a semi-regular series which sees us trying to find merit in the abject, the terrible, and the deathly dull. We don't believe that there's such a thing as "guilty pleasure", so this series sets out to prove that even the most shocking and schlocky corners of dance music can find a home in somebody's heart.

It's always sad when early promise dissipates into the abjectly unfeeling nothingness of mediocrity isn't it? The sense of an impending sensation slowly drips away like mince fat down the drain and all we're left with is that horrible weighty feeling of disappointment which clings to the roof of our mouths like so much nougat. The shock of the new becomes the beige hum of the bland and we start to look elsewhere for the momentary artistic pleasures that elevate us above animals.

Cast your mind back to the heady days of the late 00s and you might remember — amongst other things — an Italian disco duo called Aeroplane. Aeroplane were, for a period, incredibly hot property, the Bond Street of musical Monopoly. Initially a duo comprising of Vito de Luca and Stephen Fasano, who left in 2010 citing irreconcilable music differences as the reason for the split, Aeroplane's early singles were sun-spangled slices of beach-ready cosmic-balearic-disco that shone effervescently.

Listening back to tracks like "Caramellas" or "Whispers" or "Above the Clouds" is a bittersweet affair. We know now what was to come. The same is true of their finest moment, and arguably one of the finest moments of the last fifteen years in general, which was their indomitable mix for Discobelle which, sadly, seems lost like tears in rain. If you've still got a copy knocking about do the honourable thing upload it somewhere so we can all sit back and bask in its glorious glow. Cheers.

Still though, even the memory of something perfect is tainted by the knowing that things end up going wrong. We can't escape the present, however firmly we shove our head in the calming quicksands of the past. We have to face and embrace it, however painful that experience might be. Let's get to grips with reality — let's reassess We Can't Fly.

We Can't Fly is Aeroplane's only album to date and was, in effect, a Vita de Luca solo project. By the time of it's release, Fasano had parachuted out, presumably spending his days running toes through white sand, stopping for the odd brisk swim and stiff cocktail, free in the knowledge that he wasn't responsible for an album that's looked back on with a mixture of embarrassment, revulsion, and fear.

The critics weren't kind. Pitchfork called it a "schizophrenic and ultimately confused record," and noted that, "We Can't Fly has the feel of a record that's to be everything to everybody— hit receptacle, compendium of past works, exploration — and as such ends up being nothing," ultimately resulting in an album in which, "The misses miss big, and perplexingly." ResidentAdvisor weren't much nicer about it. For them, "what's clumsily at stake on We Can't Fly is the age-old desire from anyone in the dance music community to reconcile immediate dance floor-bound imperatives and more long lasting, artsy and serious home-listening credentials brought about by the release of a first album."

All those points are specific and valid. The thing is, it turns out now that maybe, just maybe, We Can't Fly isn't that bad. Maybe, just maybe, We Can't Fly is…sort of good? Let's be honest here — most dance artist records are kind of bad, or at least prone to padding — and no one, not even me, is going to ever try and hold We Can't Fly up as a major piece of art that deserves continued and prolonged exposure and canonisation, but honestly, listen to it now, take an hour out of your day and sit with it, soak it up, engage and react to it.

What happens when you do that? Well, you'll find an album that's so overblown, so maximally ridiculous that you can't help but laugh. It's unlikely that de Luca wants us to react in such a manner, but hey, as everyone knows, this is a post-Barthes world where the author's relinquished all sense of intent. The work is ours to read, ours to interpret. If I want to piss myself laughing at a song called "Fish in the Sky" — a song called "Fish in the Sky" that sounds like a godawful New Wave tune that you'd find stuffed down in the lower reaches of a petrol station bought compilation that's literally sat there gathering dust for years — then I will piss myself laughing at it.

That's the perverse joy of We Can't Fly: it flies so hard and furiously in the face of good taste while all the while being incredibly self-conscious about its credibility that you can't help but admire it. Songs like "The Point of No Return" (a grimly fascinating Queen pastiche), "I Don't Feel" (Poundstretcher Lindstrom vocalled by someone who thinks they do a really good version of "Kiss Me Again" at karaoke) and "Without Lies" (which comes on like a music composition student really, really into Hans Zimmerman having a go at some oddball synthpop-in-space ditty about eating cherries) are so outlandish, so genuinely bizarre, that you're drawn to them. It's like naïve art or amateur poetry in the sense that the terrible, the godawful, is often more interesting than the acceptable, the consumable, the ignorable.

Whilst it plays, We Can't Fly is impossible to ignore. It constantly throws shit at the listener — a twiddly solo here, a Scissor Sisters aping piano riff there — to the point where there's nothing left to do but sit back and admire it in all it's gauche glory. It's like squinting at the Sagrada Familia — everything about it magnificently, toweringly wrong and yet you're unable to look away, transfixed by ugliness and wrongness and wonkiness and the dawning realization that this world is as in need of the wonky, the wrong, and the ugly as much as it is the sacred and the profane.

It's doubtful that you'll find yourself digging it out with any kind of regularity — playing it in full really is a masochist's delight — but that's kind of the point of it. We Can't Fly teaches us the importance of acceptance. It's a mess but a glorious one. That's life.

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