Good Flying Birds, 'Talulah's Tape' Album Review

Good Flying Birds’ Talulah’s Tape Is an Impressive and Irresistible Introduction

Whether he likes it or not, the enigmatic Northwest Indiana musician Mark Winter is closely associated with the squirmy, synth-friendly genre known as egg punk, thanks to his role in the Coneheads, who crystalized the style in the mid-2010s. But Winter has played and recorded punk rock under a bunch of names over the years, including Big Zit, C.C.T.V., Ooze, Hot Beef, Liquids, and Guinea Kid. And then there’s D.L.I.M.C., which finds him in a slightly slower and more melodic place, where he softens the hard edges of his music just a bit and lands somewhere closer to jangling indie-pop.

None of this would be particularly relevant if Kellen Baker wasn’t also based in Indiana—a couple hours downstate from Winter, in the big city of Indianapolis. Their proximity—both physical and aesthetic—makes it easy to draw a line between D.L.I.M.C. and Baker’s Good Flying Birds project, whose Talulah’s Tape has been one of the best albums of 2025 since way back on January 2, when it was released on cassette by the St. Louis label Rotten Apple. It’s still one of the best albums of 2025, now that it’s been co-reissued by Carpark Records and Smoking Room.

Good Flying Birds may or may not be directly influenced by D.L.I.M.C.—Baker didn’t cite them in Paste’s Best of What’s Next feature on the band in August—but they certainly are cut from the same cloth. Both construct short, earworm-y songs by making expert use of a limited toolkit, and neither is afraid of a little hiss and fuzz around the edges. In this corner of the rock ‘n’ roll universe, homemade signifiers are a feature, not a bug.

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In fact, Talulah’s Tape actually compiles “all (Baker’s) scattered demos … recorded at home between 2021-2024,” according to Rotten Apple, which makes it an unfiltered look at his exceptional ability to write melodies and guitar riffs catchy enough to cut through the lo-fi atmosphere. The rollercoaster chord progression of opening track “Down On Me,” for example, is instantly bop-along-able, while “Dynamic” packs like four different killer hooks into three minutes. Both sound like the early recordings of Elephant 6 heroes the Apples in Stereo.

More often though, Good Flying Birds sound like the Apples’ trippier E6 sibling, the Olivia Tremor Control. You can hear it in the twin barbed guitars of “I Care For You,” the sweetly psychedelic twee of “Everyday Is Another,” the driving paisley churn of “Eric’s Eyes,” and even in the album’s interstitial pieces—a drum break with animal sounds, a noisy guitar freakout and six-second sound experiment. All would feel perfectly at home on Dusk At Cubist Castle. (Also, as long as we’re talking Elephant 6, Good Flying Birds’ easygoing “Golfball” is the best Beulah song in two decades.)

Elsewhere, Baker cranks things up to legit punk levels (“Wallace”), tears through some impressive drum parts (“Fall Away”) and guitar licks (“Glass”), and unspools a lovely instrumental (“GFB”) that sounds like it could be the theme music for some small-budget TV show about a sweater-vested police detective with a stack of Chickfactor magazines at home. The album’s final track, “Last Straw,” stretches out to nearly five minutes long, as Baker returns to lyrical themes that recur throughout Talulah’s Tape: Falling for someone, falling out, and falling apart—and not always in that order. Against a small army of buzzing guitars, he sings, “Maybe you could change / If you want to / I haven’t seen the signs / So please don’t waste my time.”

One last thing: Besides some vocals and drums by Nina Pitchkites and Kevin Krauter of Wishy on one song and saxophone by Simon Poromer on another, Baker performed every sound on Talulah’s Tape. And in case it isn’t already clear, he wrote all the songs and recorded them himself. We know these things because he wrote them on the folded paper insert that came with the Rotten Apple cassette, which sold out of its run of 300 copies long ago. “If you’re new here, hello!,” it says, scrawled in black marker. “This is probably the best possible way to get to know me.”

Nice to meet you, Kellen. Very excited to hear more.

Ben Salmon is a committed night owl with an undying devotion to discovering new music. He lives in the great state of Oregon, where he hosts a killer radio show and obsesses about Kentucky basketball from afar. Ben has been writing about music for more than two decades, sometimes for websites you’ve heard of but more often for alt-weekly papers in cities across the country. Follow him on Twitter at @bcsalmon.

Good Flying Birds’ Talulah’s Tape Is an Impressive and Irresistible Introduction

Kellen Baker constructs short, earworm-y songs by making expert use of a limited toolkit, and he isn’t afraid of a little hiss and fuzz around the edges.