Infinite Shuffle

The musical pairing that is Fort Atlantic likely saw its stock rise within the last week after having its anthemic single, “Let Your Heart Hold Fast”, playing during the climactic final scene of the most recent episode of How I Met Your Mother.

That’s certainly how I came across the group, which is basically Jon Black, a singer, songwriter and musical jack-of-all-trades, paired with drummer Josh Cannon.

The duo came together in 2010 after Black had been tinkering in his new home studio in Athens, Ga., wrote a bunch of new songs and decided what he created was bigger than anything he could handle, so he called in Cannon for support.

With the help of New York-based mixer/producer Tom Schick, they put together a 10-track, self-titled album that was released in May of this year. For the most part, the disc is full of solid folk/rock-pop. But at times they dabbled with the laptops a little too much.

The first two tracks — “No One Will Know” and “Career Advice” — are good old folk rock. Then comes the aforementioned “Let Your Heart Hold Fast”, which could easily be in consideration for everyone’s song of the year if anyone else actually knew the album existed.

After the mostly forgettable “Up From the Ground”, things go in a totally different direction with an artsy/experimental 8-minute-long “I’m Wrong”, which is an instrumental for the first five of those minutes.

That’s followed by “Movie Screen”, a very slow, churning, powerful song that is almost ballad-like. Then on “New York Lights”, Black brings things back to the folk side. Way back in fact, as he does his best Bob Dylan impression, right down to the harmonica.

Next is “My Love Is With You”, which is more of a modern alt-country ballad, something that Ryan Adams might sing. Then they close with a couple more forgettable tracks — “The Wrecking Ball” and “There Is Love”.

All in all, Fort Atlantic certainly have the potential to craft a great song, they’re just a little to hit-and-miss. Black and Cannon need to figure out what kind of band they want to be and then stick with it rather than jumping all over the place on each record.