Longtime friends Ben Flanagan and Jamie McGoldrick have teamed up for a new adventure in indie-pop wonderland: The Trophy Fire. In just one year, The Trophy Fire has already performed with prominent acts like Ozma and Dredg, and they've landed spots at festivals like SXSW and San Francisco's Noise Pop. Their forthcoming debut on Talking House Records, A Lifetime in the Middle of the Ocean, is a somber indie-pop album reminiscent of Pinback and Jimmy Eat World.

Flanagan made his first mark on the industry with pop-punk band The Actual, who had a solid run on Scott Weiland's Softdrive Records (Weiland co-produced The Actual's album and put them on tour with Velvet Revolver). Around the same time, Flanagan and McGoldrick began composing and recording for The Trophy Fire. With Flanagan on vocals and guitar and McGoldrick on lead guitar, for this project the duo eschewed loud rock excesses in favor of their inner passion for sober, articulate song writing.

With the merging of Flanagan's dark lyrical vocals over uplifting chord progressions and percussive guitar grooves, The Trophy Fire is expanding the percolating San Francisco music scene into unexpected, distinctive territory. From the spidery plucking of the dark "Dearly Departed" to the to the summertime bounce of "Sundown" to the album's powerful piano-driven anthem "For Jackson," the consistent strength of their diverse songwriting holds this fantastic indie-pop record together.

Strangely, what may tie the entire history of The Trophy Fire together is the study of philosophy. It was Flanagan's father, a philosophy professor at Duke University, who bought Flanagan his first electric guitar. And it was in a philosophy class at the University of San Francisco where Flanagan and McGoldrick met. "We sat next to each other, we both had big hair, and at the break we just started talking about music and Fugazi," Flanagen says.

So the pair struck up a friendship and for one class assignment, they performed a song about philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey's ideas on Hermeneutics – set to the tune of Tom Petty's "Free Falling." They're proud to say they got an A-.

Flanagan and McGoldrick went on to play in a couple of Bay Area bands together and caught the ear of Talking House Records, wbo were immediately captivated by the songwriting and live performance of their local band called Dear Kerosene. McGoldrick has lived in San Francisco most of his life while Flanagan is a recent transplant from North Carolina, but both are excited about the recent resurgence of the San Francisco music scene. "The last few years, I've gotten into music in the Bay Area more than I ever have," McGoldrick says.

Fittingly, it was in the Bay Area, in the studio of Talking House Records, where Flanagan and McGoldrick recorded A Lifetime in the Middle of the Ocean. Four different Bay Area drummers performed on the record, sometimes with multiple drummers on a single song, as well as a creditable list of local favorite guests on keyboards, guitar and backing vocals. Behind the controls was Talking House producer and sound engineer Justin Lieberman – a man who's also worked on albums with Carlos Santana, Alanis Morissette, and Les Claypool. From the surface, it's a laid back record full of sunny melodies, but listen closer: there's Flanagan's thick, dark lyrics.

The result is an album that brings you into a sort of twisted Candyland – McGoldrick lures you in with lollipops while Flanagan whispers bitter everythings in your ear. It's a place where locusts swarm the sugar cane fields and worms infest every shiny red apple. The smell of cotton candy mingles with the smell of burning cigarettes, and this songwriting duo is smiling the whole time.