Kevin Bronson on June 22nd, 2017

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Michael Fiore is one-third of L.A. punk trio Criminal Hygiene — usually the one in the New York Islanders’ garb — a band that (painstakingly slowly) has been working on new recordings with producer Alex Newport. In the meantime, he’s made a lo-fi solo album under the name Maltman Fair. “Baby Flies an Airplane” is an acoustic/electric melangé of slacker wisdom (“Nothing in life / I can’t do from my bed”), bluesy bloodletting, off-kilter British Invasion homage, malicious punk squalls, ear-shredding experimentation and, like the album cover, other house fires waiting to happen. Fiore played and recorded everything himself, except for Taylor Plenn’s saxophone solo on “Angeline” — “because my saxophone skills are somewhere on the level of Twenty One Pilots’ lyrical abilities,” he says. It’s all wildly inconsistent, and at moments you think Fiore might be just be punking bloggers, but at least he’s not out flying airplanes.

||| Stream: “Stand Back” (or the whole album here)