Album Recommendations | mari@macintosh.garden
Artist: Starflyer 59
Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.
Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable. Read the review.
I Am the Portuguese Blues (2004)
As monochrome as its cover, but that's not an insult.
By 2004, the Starflyer Motorcycle Club had dropped all pretenses of being a noisy rock outfit, with Leave Here a Stranger and Old channeling Beach Boys more than bloody valentines. Old habits die hard though, as do rediscovered post-Americana demos, and one needs only a single glance at the monochrome cover art to tell which cloth I Am the Portuguese Blues was cut from. It's a record that confused and divided newer SF59 fans, and to this day, holds a reputation as a weird step back for the band, a cock rock detour from greatness. Does it deserve it? I don't think entirely.
At first blush, I Am the Portuguese Blues is not exactly a brilliant exhibition of Jason Martin's songwriting ability. Many tracks follow the same general swagger of hawkish guitars and sneered vocals, and some songs, namely "The Big Idea" and "Not Funny", might as well be one track. This doesn't mean they aren't ridiculously catchy, though; songs like "Unlucky" and "Worth of Labor" work as well as a "Blue Collar Love" ever did, and with only one song lasting longer than three minutes, it's Pocket Starflyer. I Am the Portuguese Blues is nobody's favorite Starflyer record, but it's also not trying to be. It's just a pretty good bite-sized rock record from a couple guys up to the task. Worth a listen.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Unlucky", "Worth of Labor", "Destiny" | "Wake Up Early" | "Teens in Love" | Great |
The Fashion Focus (1997)
Cars whizzing past in the nighttime.
Jason Martin is concerned with very little. He drives a lot, falls in love a lot, plays card games a lot. As Jason Martin is wont to do, he writes songs about these things, but in proving he's not indie's most eccentric songwriter, he proves he's indie's most economic. The leadoff track on Starflyer's The Fashion Focus, "I Drive a Lot", sums up the wistfulness that comes from being at the bottom in five lines over upbeat, strumming acoustics and prominent keyboards. The Fashion Focus is an exit ramp off from the genuinely heavy, loungy shoegaze that defined Silver and Gold. Chalk it up to aging gracefully or all-fundamentals songwriting, but this album stands tall alongside them.
The rest of the album keeps the steady, low-key, nighttime atmosphere, though Jason reminds us that he can still choke us with walls of guitars on "Too Much Fun". Some would call it out of place, and maybe that's true, but the songwriting is so consistent that it's hardly an issue. Elsewhere, Jason writes the finest Christmas in July song ever laid to tape ("A Holiday Song"), likens the dark to death in the catchiest way possible ("Sundown"), and gets in his traditional one awkward Christianity reference per album ("Days of Lamech"). If there's anything Jason's songs lack, it's usually endings—"All the Time" is a chorus looking for a song, and a mind-numbing refrain to match the road he's been on for the last couple of hours.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Sundown", "The Fashion Focus", "Too Much Fun" | "I Drive a Lot" | "All the Time" | Great |
Gold (1995)
Starflyer are near to the brokenhearted.
I can only imagine how deranged Gold sounded when it came out. The smother of rumbling guitars, shrieking, agonized feedback, tremolo leads that tremble like a nervous breakdown—counteracted by bone-dry 70's drums and Jason Martin's anti-loud vocals, whispered like the man's dying in front of you. I cannot think of another album that has a sonic profile like Gold. This was the product of a sick mind left to record an album effectively by his lonesome, the kind who hasn't seen the sun all month, and the song titles sound like the self-absorbed castigating you do when you're sick and navelgazing. "Stop Wasting Your Whole Life", "When You Feel Miserable", "Messed Up Over You". I could certainly relate when I found it.
Though the thick, almost cinematic smog of guitars and ear-splitting feedback freakouts are draws all their own, Gold's gentler and poppier moments are just as striking. "You're Mean" strikes a spring reverb-loaded 60's surfy tone, and "Somewhere When Your Heart Glowed the Hope" has a brightness to it that makes it one of my favorites across the entire Starflyer catalog. Though it's usually pretty simple lyrically (my friend sushi once described Gold as effectively instrumental in practice), the low-key closer "One Shot Juanita" offers the sharpest, most depressed and resigned line on the entire project: "Time's only wasted when you know like I know/The past times weren't the better times at all". This could've easily been maudlin mush, but by letting the guitars do the wailing, Starflyer comes out with an ideal soundtrack for anyone's moping.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "A Housewife Love Song", "Messed Up Over You", "Somewhere When Your Heart Glowed the Hope" | "Stop Wasting Your Whole Life / Messed Up and Down" | "When You Feel the Mess" | Classic |