Comedian Rich Hall recently made an acute observation: "I don't see the point of testing cosmetics on rabbits...They're already cute." Along the same lines, I don't see the point in unsigned artists playing it safe. You try to enter a mean and overcrowded business by setting yourself apart, and going for broke with every musical dream you want to realize, or at least every idea you can fit onto a disc. Of course, this makes for a lot of debuts that fill up 80-minute CDs, but thirty minutes should only be for those suckers who know they'll get a second chance. Ten seconds into David Zwieg's hour-long All Now With Wings, you know he's a sucker who could've given us just a breath or two.

A few seconds into "Anything and Everything", I realized that this guy is something special. The playing is fantastic, the voice is intense, "trying not to fall", and his heart is all over each beat. Then the song shifts gears, and a folkie expands his voice to twice the width of Eddie Vedder's pipes, and it begins its emotional downpour over brilliantly orchestrated madness. On All Now With Wings, Zweig pounds us with lyrics in which the angst makes sense ("Here is the part where I fall apart/And I said it's not fair!"), and music that's modern, muscular and intense -- a combination of Who's Next, The Joshua Tree, and The Soft Bulletin.

If you like the Gloria Record, you will love David Zweig. If you love The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway or the singing behind Pearl Jam's "Jeremy", you will love this. It's far from emo, and far from almost anything I've heard in a while, but it's very powerful -- and accessible, too, far more so than Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. In some way, I guess that's the best record to which to compare All Now With Wings, as airplanes and the sky keep on popping up in the songs, and Zweig really does have this mentality of getting everything that has ever moved him into his own music. He's supported by a fantastic supporting cast (the David Zweig Philharmonic?) from the Chicago Symphony and Navy Marching Band, and arrangements that are seldom short of phenomenal. Some people might eventually tire of the power and thrust of each song, but this is one time when words like "variety" seem overrated and silly to me. David Zweig has a story to tell, a tale that has him flying in the sky; since he wants us to hear it, why the fuck should he whisper? Or, God help us, tell his tale in a disinterested drone?

"It's been a long slow burn", he says in one of his nine-minute opuses, but this is not the type of CD to slowly catch up on you. It's sixty minutes of passionate vocals, calling out to bring the boys back home. Bring 'em all home, and get 'em to buy this album. It's better than anything the Moody Blues have done, it's better than all the recent Pink Floyd, and it's got to be high up there on anybody's list of great records their friends don't own. As recorded by the gifted Keith Cleversley (of Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev fame), All Now With Wings falls short on only one song ("Time is Movin'"). But even on that track, particularly when the Sharyan Culberson Choir takes over, there are thirty-second spells in which the music and emotion literally shake you. Hopefully record labels won't keep "staring at the sun" and staying blind to this great talent.