Now Playing: Starling Electric--"A Snowflake"
Starling Electric, discussed earlier, released their CD, Clouded Staircase, at a lively Blind Pig show Friday night. The fact that it was finally out in its finished form made my week, but the show itself and its aftermath made for one of the best Fridays on record. The openers were rather interesting, an ascending ladder of quality, starting with Lazy Sunday (a great Small Faces song for a name, good beat and decent vocals but little melody), running through the Dardanelles (again, a great name for a band; they started out a little blah but suddenly shifted into proper gear halfway through their set), then the Satin Peaches (a local batch of relative younglings who nevertheless managed to rock out, even when the lead guitarist's tuner broke), and then Starling Electric. The show was fantastic, as most of their shows were that I've sen. I hung for the most part with Sara, then Adam and Margot, talked with Brandon and John, and managed to dance a good deal, even though I thought I might be too tired after that week. The afterparty at the band's house in the Old West Side was maybe the most pleasanlty weird I'd attended in a good long while. The living arrangements, with all members but one living there, put me in mind of Traffic. There were two DVDs of Once Upon A Time In The West I counted, which in turn put me in mind of the last place I lived, with Mike and Sean; all three of us owned Belle and Sebastian's The Boy With The Arab Strap. I'd actually been to that same house a couple of years before, following bad directions given by my friends to a party of theirs; it turned out there was a party at the house, just not the right one. It being Ann Arbor, I milled around nevertheless for about ten minutes just to see if I could do it. One guy actually did come in off the street and struck up a conversation. I employed my own example in persuading him to remain. Through the course of the early morning, I donned a baby mask and wielded a toy submachine gun (what they were doing there remains unexplained), talked regional accents with Jessica, a friend of Caleb's, soaked up Sara's exuberant chipperness, watched Adam and Margot flaunt their screwball-comedy chops by knocking over an outdoor bookcase while making out, traded secondhand Saturday Night Live impressions of Charles Nelson Reilly and Harry Caray with Adam, dipped into a discussion on musical showmanship and artistic integrity (it had to do with pacing the sets and the songs to draw an audience, and there were good points on both sides; I trust the lads not to do anything extreme, like staging an ice-skating Arthurian musical a la Rick Wakeman), and finally left at four-thirty in the morning. I had an hour of sleep, but didn't really feel it.
The album itself is a marvel, encapsulating the lush sounds of 60s and 70s sunshine and jangle pop (references to a later era, but I think the phrases still fit) while including darker textures. It never becomes too airy, or an exercise in futile nostalgia. I've thought for some time that pop music's reached the fail-safe point in terms of artistic progress--this may, of course, be a symptom of age, but it seems like all the musical styles have come around once or twice already and are now being put together and pulled apart like Legos.* I think Starling Electric are simply more honest about the situation than others, without becoming unoriginal or obsessively referential. The grandeur of the arrangements and melodies breaks through any possibility of cheap irony, surging and swelling with a sincerity you don't often see nowadays. It works like a classic album of the old school, at time, evoking Pet Sounds or early Pink Floyd (even the Allman Brothers) while retaining its own character. You can dig the obvious singles like "Camp-Fire" or "Black Ghost/Black Girl" early on and later wallow in the more leisurely pace of "She Goes Through Phases" or the third title track. The loveliest moment, though, is the first vocal gap on the second title track, where the guitars and percussion suddenly meet a gorgeous little swirl of harpsichord and organ (I think--the effect ended up sounding something like a flute). The latter continues throughout the song, but as usual, it's the first encounter that's the beauty (and the most ephemeral). It's pop music for thinking, and prog-rock that actually remembers it has an audience to delight.
*There's nothing wrong with this; in my view, orchestral music hit a wall after Schoenberg pioneered atonalism with Pierrot Lunaire early last century (believe it or not, I used to have it on vinyl back when I still had the capability). After that, it seemed like everything new hearkened to something done before without any serious breakthroughs like Orfeo or the Eroica. Good music was still there, though--Gershwin managed to combine late romanticism with jazz, Vaughan Williams and Delius did the same thing with English folk music (more in the former's case), and someone like Arvo Part does very well with his modern stuff (I don't care for Philip Glass myself, but he's got an audience). The same thing seems to be happening with postmodern pop music. The whole idea of artistic "progress" implies a teleological narrative of the kind I learned to distrust before I left my teens, like Marxism or Christianity. The fact that I even used the phrase "teleological narrative" suggests that this whole entry's gotten way too serious, and now I'm off to watch Captain Kronos or something.
Posted by Charles J. Microphone
at 12:38 PM EDT
Updated: 30 July 2006 12:39 PM EDT
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Updated: 30 July 2006 12:39 PM EDT
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