Word: splashdown
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...took Captain Chesley Sullenberger less than five minutes to become a hero, from the moment his Airbus A320 hit a flock of geese on Jan. 15 to its safe splashdown in the Hudson. For Captain Timothy Cheney and First Officer Richard Cole, it took an hour and a half of radio silence to become national punching bags. After their Northwest Airlines flight shot past its Minneapolis destination at 37,000 ft., air-traffic controllers feared the worst: A hijacking? A flight-deck catastrophe? After 91 minutes, the pilots resurfaced, saying they'd been absorbed in their laptops, reviewing...
...mentioned it. "He don't have to," his neighbor answers. "He's gonna do it." A coda to that idea is offered in the elegiac new documentary In the Shadow of the Moon. One of the scenes shows the men of Mission Control lighting cigars after the 1969 splashdown of Apollo 11. Behind them, on a control room viewing screen, two words are projected: TASK ACCOMPLISHED. That may be a less triumphal phrasing than "mission," but whatever you call it, Americans knew enough not to boast about a thing until we had done...
...traveling at a searing 24,700 m.p.h. Even after it unfurls its parachute-like parafoil and begins coasting toward the Utah desert, it will be heading for a thudding 22m.p.h. touchdown, enough to damage the collector plates, particularly if the ship has already been dinged by micrometeorites. An ocean splashdown would cause only a marginally smaller bump and would present a further risk of water contamination...
...three principal artists of Splashdown clearly have varied musical tastes, experimenting with everything from acid jazz to ambient trip-hop and hard-core guitar riffs. On their Redshift EP, sometimes these diverse elements come together in an interesting mesh, but often the combinations are jarringly incoherent. "Waterbead" incorporates ethereal vocals, jungle beats and one heavy metal interlude in a disconcerting jumble that misses the mark. The jungle beats sound particularly strange, as they sit on top of the melody, instead of forming the undercurrent of the song. In contrast, "The Archer" is a smoother ambient track, reminiscent of Luscious Jackson...
...fact, the album calls to mind a litany of role models, with Trickyesque trip-hop rhythms and a funky bass that resembles Jamiroquai. The filtered vocals and heavy bass undercurrents of "Ironspy" could come right out of Portishead. While Splashdown's sound is not fully coherent, Melissa Kaplan displays a wide range on vocals that is at times beautiful, and if the group can manage to unify their sound, they may produce a stronger album. For the moment, this exploratory album gets...