The Take Off and Landing of Everything. Not that Garvey, from the album’s title on down, seems to be trying to encrypt that theme. After the morbid nostalgia of 2011’s Build a Rocket Boys!, there’s a softer, rounder, lighter obviousness to Take Off. The arrangements are even more porous; the melodies less terrestrial. But where Build a Rocket Boys! meditated on youth, the new album dwells on, well, take offs and landings as analogs of life and death like that parallel is the most clever thing anyone’s ever thought of. Yes, Garvey’s symbology has gotten that much more sodden and heavy-handed, even as Take Off steadfastly sheds mass. On “Fly Boy Blue/ Lunette”, he’s traded in his rockets for the drudgery of commercial flight with all its degradation of wonder. Garvey’s in-flight movie may have been Up in the Air one too many times. Singing “I’m reaching the age where decisions are made on the life and the liver," he falls back on the bottle as a totem of existential boredom. His voice itself—numb, null, narcotic—spreads its warmth around that imagistic mixology.