Onefinemess

Starflyer and me.

[This an update of something I posted to my website a few years back]

Starflyer is one of the few bands whose albums actually have character to me.   There are very few bands I have this connection with, probably because one of the prerequisites is that you have to be in on the ground floor without preconceptions and really experience each album – getting them far enough apart that they have make a distinct mark on that portion of your musical life.   Many bands that I dearly love I come into late -Rancid grabbed me on their 3rd, the Clash were long gone when I caught that late train, I was 10 years distanced from early Springsteen,  and modern awesome bands like the Mendoza line I just came in a little late wound up absorbing 2-4 albums at once, probably in the wrong order.  What other band(s) to have a connection like this to?   Counting Crows is somewhat similar in that I came to the first album without much media influence, and stuck with it, really devouring and enjoying each album on its own.  Tiger Army is another band I was in on the bottom floor with, same with Death on Wednesday, but now they are long gone. *sigh* Anyway…onward!

What do I mean by “connection”?  Well each disc sort of speaks to me in a different and specific way, and carries with it a bundle of possibly unrelated memories, like nerve endings that got all tangled up and now just misfire together.  I think of the later albums usually as combinations and permutations on the old.  That’s probably the “wrong” way to look at it, but since when have I really cared?

Where to begin – well the answer to that is easier than usual I guess: the beginning.  I can’t recall the exact moment when I encountered SF, but I know it has something to do with Andy & Peter – one of them found Silver and played it for me, or told me about it.  I know this because Andy reminds me every so often.  Without that I would probably forget…

In 1993 I was a young snot just coming into some actual music taste and trying to find things that I really liked, as opposed to just listening to the junk on the radio, or regurgitating whatever was cool with the other kids.   I was saddled with the difficult position of being a young reborn Christian  and going through various “should I or shouldn’t I listen to secular music?” phases (I got rid of all my cds on at least TWO separate occasions…only to buy them all back a year or so later) AND trying to find something I could really grok to at the same time.  Luckily, there was a baby alt-christian scene and there were a few good bands (like 5) and 1 or 2 who happened to be both brilliant AND Christian, the rest was pretty meh.    The best music of the time was definitely on Tooth and Nail – almost all their early discs were worth listening to, anything before that was probably painful.  Sorry old school alt-christies, I’ve heard most (if not all) of that music and it really did suck.

Christian music in general resides up there on the highest level of soulless horseshite with the likes of Pop-country & adult contemporary (the two genres it tried so often to emulate, coincidentally), with the VAST, VAST majority of artists at the time resorting to just ripping off mainstream, and or just producing filth with no redeeming qualities at all (other than the fact that they love Jesus so golly it must be good!).   Anyway, back on topic – Starflyer was one of those few bands who was actually doing something NEW and GOOD and on a Christian music label.  They were (and still are) the band I go to when people comment about “good Christian music” being an oxymoron.  Jason never let himself be tied down (so far?) or locked into the whole “this is what Christian music should sound like” thing.  He is an artist who happens to be Christian – and it informs his writing but it does not straddle it like a 7ft Cro-Magnon rapist on a crippled cow driving its point home over and over again like you have to do when you talk to inbreds.   And that artistic integrity and spirit of raw creativity is the reason why Starflyer is still my favorite band, even though I’ve long since abandoned the world of Christianity and religion in general.

For the break down let’s take this disc by disc.

Silver, 1993.

See, my memory jumble here brings up 7th and 8th grade, images of the Flamson Middle School lunch yard and 2 story main building, of this silly picture of me and Andy,  sitting at a cement table drinking Dr. Pepper that someone took and threw out of the yearbook, and thus gave the original to us.   But, of course that’s not quite right because in 1993 I was a freshman/sophomore in high school.  Which matches the memories I have of Peter hauling our whole squad around in their old brown Dodge Ram that we used to joke had survived Desert Storm (I suspect it’s still out there somewhere, hauling troops from one hot zone to another) listening to Silver, She is the Queen, and Gold.  That opening blast to Blue Collar Love still gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and evokes memories of my bedroom at my Dad’s old Templeton house.    The album as a whole makes me think of long drives to the beach in the aforementioned Dodge Tank, with Peter still not able to drive and fuck with the cassette player at the same time, and often getting us killed numerous times as a result.   And us yelling at him for it.  “Dungeon” holds a special place in my heart as one of the few SF songs I ever learned to play any part of – Peter figured it out and one of our bands used to play it. I forget which band incarnation…the one with Jeremy Johnson & Eric Swagger I *think*.  But I’m often wrong.  Which reminds me of how the wiring in Eric’s basement was fried, and we’d always get shocked from the floor or whatever when we practiced down there…

But what does it sound like man!?  It’s a very liquid album.  The guitar on the various songs reminds me of waves of different size and strength.  I know it sounds cheezy, but sometimes I can really feel “lost” in the “sea” of sound that is Silver.  In a good way.  In retrospect it reminds me a little of Hum, who I didn’t discover peripherally until 2 years later with You’d Prefer an Astronaut (which I didn’t track down in a store until YEARS later).  To be fair, their second disc, Elektra 2000 also came out in 1993, but that has a different kind of intensity and wholly different vibe than Silver, to me.  I’ve heard lots of comparisons of this album to My Bloody Valentine, but I must not have the right MBV albums, because the “glaring” similarities that I’ve heard mentioned don’t jump out to me.  True, MBV is an obvious influence (and I’m pretty sure Jason has said this in interviews as well), but I don’t think SF is derivative in any way – what he took from MBV I think he definitely brought forward.

In retrospect this is such a great album, it stands out totally burned into my memory as different than everything else, and as much a bridge into a new musical world (which I have since followed into bands like My Bloody Valentine that pre-date SF, contemporaries like Joe Christmas that were outlasted, and all kinds of other shoegazy bands that have come and gone in the interim) as Madness, Rancid & Springsteen were to me to the worlds of ska, punk & rock & roll and their million bastard children.  These were the bands of my musical awakenings, remaining on my list of favorite music through the years and leading me to their roots and offspring.  Bands like these have laid out the boundaries for the soundtracks of my lives, and will always be with me in one form or another.

She is the Queen EP, 1994.

This was possibly my introduction to Joy  Electric, by way of Ronnie Martin remixing  Blue Collar Love.   It also abounds with imagery of that bedroom at my dad’s Templeton house…which is weird , as I’m pretty sure we lived in the apartment in Paso by then.  This was another good one for driving, and also probably the most romantic I can recall Jason Martin ever writing.  With two (count them: She’s the Queen, She was my Sweetheart) songs seeming to directly relate to young/retro love (more noticeably so than the songs like Housewife Love Song on Gold), this is the album that conjures up images of the girls I had crushes on in High School.  Never mind that She’s the Queen may have been written about his mother…or maybe it was her picture on the album, I do forget.  And with more songs specifically about California (Monterey, Salinas, Canary Row) it has that nice Highway 101 feel to it.

The sound is, for the most part, a focus on the mellower elements of Silver, with even more mellowness and atmospheric withdrawal thrown in.  You get the sense that songs like Salinas could easily have fit on Silver, but to me there is a sense of distinctness.  Maybe just created by the temporal distance between the two, but it’s still there, and concrete, for me.

Gold,  1995.

A wonderful album, with possibly one of the best two line songs ever (Duel Overhead Cam), which also happened to contain one of the most intense moments of feedback I had ever processed in my young life – that spot in the song surely pissed off a number of travelers in what was passing for my transportation those days.  Ahh, my period red 78 Pinto wagon.  That’s mostly what this album reminds me of.  Cruising around in my own vehicle – now it was my turn to almost kill people!  I think at this point was maybe the first time I got to see them live…here my memory totally fails me and I should ask Andy or Peter.  I think we drove up to Concord to see them…or maybe they went without me.  Either way, I did see them at one point.  This was a great album for night driving out to the beach.

Gold takes the sound of Silver, and both harshens it and softens it at the same time – tracks like the aforementioned Duel Overhead Cam and the opener A Housewife Love Song take the wall (or wave!) of distortion sound to the next level, while tracks like You’re Mean are even softer “mellow” songs.  Other tracks, like Indiana, do both.  Even though it does pack some serious distortion, the vibe from the songs in general are very mellow.   True, Silver is a “mellow” album in general, as is gold…but they are mellow in different ways man! If Silver is the oceanic album, Gold is like the aged driftwood and glass album, I suppose.  :)

Le Vainqueur EP, 1995.

Surprisingly I have a few really solid images locked in my brain and tied to this tiny 4 song (2 of them versions of the same track) disc.  The images are of listening to the ep, possibly for the first time, in the bedroom Andy & Peter shared in their house by the high school.  The same house we used to have the male bonding nights at – playing black out hide and seek to deafening music, and at least once we had an awesome shirts vs. skins pillow fight war that spilled out into the street.  Or something, it does get fuzzy – sort of like the music.

The sound follows in the same vein as gold: 2 (3 if you count 2 versions of the same song) mix the heavy distortion wall of sound with much “thinner” breaks in between, while The Starflyer 2000 Reprise (which is actually a redo of a Starflyer song called “Leigh and Me” done originally with a female vocalist for the Artcore I compilation, now done with Jason’s voice) follows the path of the paper thin for the entire track.

Plugged EP, 1996.

This one unfortunately was the one of their early discs I never managed to track down until much later.  Since it was pretty much a concert only sell, and the internet was young then I didn’t have much chance to get it.  I think at one point Jamie finally got a copy of it from somewhere and I was able to hear it from him.  I seem to recall the fact that you could actually hear the guy (not Jason) saying the French stuff from Le Vainqueuer quite loudly.

Americana, 1997.

This was the album where the sound began to change, noticeably to me at least. I mean, really it didn’t so much, the heavy guitars and trademark buzz type solo lines are still there.  But the pace had been picked up, as it were.  There was the tiniest bit more of rock influence, and you could feel it in the way the music moved.  I think it was the first album that had the lyrics in the jacket, if I recall correctly, and it was the first time we got to confirm that yes, the lyrics were as minimalist as we thought.  This was the album of transition for me…the album that marked my last year in High School and what should have been my first year in college.  That I chickened out and went to Cuesta junior college for a year and a half is probably why that year was such a blur.  Somewhere around here or maybe 1996 we (Andy, Peter, I and many others) saw them play in a little church in Atascadero with Fine China and a few other bands, maybe one of our friend’s bands, I forget.  But I think this was the first time I said something to Jason…I don’t remember what it was, probably just that I loved the band and had been following since Silver.  You know, the usual junk you say to someone whose work you respect incredibly but with whom you have no idea what to talk about and don’t want to be too annoying.

For this album, Jason took the fuzz back a few notches – oh it’s still there and impossible to miss, but it doesn’t feature as centrally in the songs themselves as it did before.  Where before the distortion was actually an instrument of sorts, now it is often (but not always!) occupying the more standard role of additional flesh for the guitar.  There are even some almost audibly so straight up rock sounding riffs in here!

The Fashion Focus, 1998.

My favorite SF album.  The first SF album I really got into in my post-christian life too.  The album that proved to me that I could still deeply enjoy and respect work put out by someone involved in what I considered to be a waste of a lifetime (religion).  It probably helped me to maintain a respect for those who choose to follow the various religions – it is everyone’s individual right as a human to do so, and of course that is going to inform their music.  But as long as they’re not trying to proselytize me, it’s all good.   Strangely, the memories this album conjures are of  1999-2000 when I lived in the house on Pasado in Isla Vista.  Of the despondently beautiful “I Drive A Lot”, still my favorite Starflyer song.  The strongest emotional connection I ever formed with a Starflyer song was the bond I have with that song.  I can’t really describe why I bonded with that song like I did, but it connected me on multiple levels, the musical level being somehow separate than the lyrical and mood-bearing levels.  It sounds funky I know.  It echoes in my head as I think of the 2 hour drive from Santa Barbara to Paso to visit friends and family (not that long of a drive I know!  But it always felt so long and lonely at that point in my life), or of the long walks I’d take (alone or with friends) in the late night post party streets of IV, pondering the meaning of life and the hangover.  I think I actually must have tuned out of Christian music at this point, as I might have been a year or two late in picking up this album…that would jive with the memories I have left.  This is probably the album I got Jen into Starflyer with…and now she’s also in loooooove with them. :)

Looking back on the album now, I can hear more clearly that this was “a” next step past Americana.  At the time it really just sounded out of the blue to me.  Not that it was radically different, but the whole feeling of “change” with the album just came across so strongly to me.  This is probably one of the few cases where the cover of a cd so strongly affected my perceptions.  It seems strange I know, but for a band that had for 5 years used solid colors for album covers (except the 2nd EP I know!), having an album cover that looked like an actual sort of modernist album cover really threw me, and affected my perception of the songs as well.  TFF continues on the path of “cleaning up” much of the Starflyer sound, removing even more of the distortion, in both the not-so-mellow and mellow tracks.  Many of the tracks have a sort of Gold-style to them, except for there are fewer distortion interludes – there are definitely still distortion tracks though: The Birthrite, Shut Your Mouth & Too Much Fun (clocking in at 7:42!).  It’s almost like the first half of the album is the “progressive” part, and then the last half is there to remind us who we are dealing with.  I mean, not entirely, not really at all, but superficially sort of.  If that makes any sense.  Not that it has to.

Fell in Love at 22 EP, 1999.

I might have got this at the same time as  the Fashion Focus, this is one of the discs I don’t have much of any memory bundles to go with, it just kind of slips by.  It is a great, solid ep though.  It was a good time period for an ep as well, as the sound was in the process of changing in leaps and bounds.   Well, what looked like leaps and bounds to a hardcore fan anyway, I’m sure many casual listeners think it all sounds the same.   The first three albums felt like a more gradual process to me, stepping it up a few notches between Americana & The Fashion Focus, and between The Fashion Focus & Everybody Makes Mistakes.

The mellow nature of this disc was more of a smoke break (not that I endorse smoking!  It’s a metaphor people!!) between the two albums than a bridge though.  The songs feel like extras from the Fashion Focus sessions, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what they were.  In fact – Fell in Love at 22 is obviously on both discs, but the riffs of E.P. nights hearken all the way back to Gold & Americana as well as forecasting the sound of the distortion used on Everybody Makes Mistakes.

Everybody Makes Mistakes, 1999.

To me, an ironically titled album, as it was my least favorite (now tied for second least favorite).  It’s hard to put a finger on why this album never stuck with me, as it has some really great songs.  Andy said at one point it was because “A Dethroned King” was so overtly Christian it convicted me, or annoyed me, one of those, which I disagree.  It is hard to say why I find that song so annoying (it being the worst song Jason Martin has written), but I found it bad enough to sour the rest of the album.  It wasn’t the obvious religious nature of it, in fact I don’t think it’s really that obviously religion in nature at all – only someone in the know would pick up on it.  It’s not the repetitive nature of it – hell, almost every song on the first 3 SF albums was more repetitive than this one.  It’s not the main riff, which does strongly annoy me – well, maybe I don’t like the riff?  Anyway, I can’t put my finger on it, but I just don’t like the song.  And, me having such high expectations of Mr. Martin, and this song being the first let down, ever – those two things together probably couple to make this album a sour spot in my Starflyer mental scrapbook.  But still – there are some excellent songs, in fact, the majority of the songs are very strong individual songs, many of them stronger than individual songs on The Fashion Focus.   They were definitely more poppy and hooky though – except for The Party, My Name, & Just Try – the remaining songs were rather upbeat and poppy (well, poppy for Starflyer).  Maybe that was another part of what threw me?  Retrospectively I think I might have subconsciously noticed him steering towards pop hooks and been horrified.  The Fashion Focus showed him being more affected by the Indie rock of the time – obvious in the song structure and especially in the album cover & packaging.  So maybe I was afraid of my precious Starflyer selling out and going to shit?  Luckily that didn’t happen.

Easy Come, Easy Go, 2000.

The “Greatest Hits” compilation.  Yes, I bought this too – it has lots of extras (a whole disc worth of alternate takes, a cover, and some live tracks), as well as being a great intro to Starflyer for newbs.  And one thing I do still evangelize occasionally is Starflyer…

Leave Here a Stranger, 2001.

If I recall, this is Andy W’s least favorite SF album, although I can’t remember his exact words so I won’t misquote him.  This has the sound of the “album about being a band” that many bands tend to do at one point , with the first 3 song titles being direct music references: All My Friends Who Play Guitar, Can You Play Drums & When I Learn to Sing.  The later songs also seemed to deal with the concept of getting old and making music, and in that sense the album had more unity as a whole than most of the previous ones.  I think it’s their best “background” album, as the songs here run together more than any of the other albums, and they also maintain a regular sort of vibe (in the sense that they flow together easily and don’t have a lot of tempo/volume differences between them) that hadn’t been heard since the first three albums.

The sound of this album is a little out of place in context with the rest of the albums to date, which seem to me chart a course of gradual acclimation to indie pop-rock sensibilities and more standardized song shape.   I’m not saying there is anything “standard” about Starflyer – they/he are still very good at what they do.  This album is perhaps, a little step backwards (in the progression sense, not at all in a negative way) from Everybody Makes Mistakes, towards a sound and vibe something in between the “new” style songs of The Fashion Focus (I Drive A Lot, Sundown, etc.) and Americana.  That being said, you can still here pieces some newer stuff from Everybody Makes mistakes too.

All in all, I definitely like this album, but it does fall near the bottom of the ranking pile, simply because if there is to be a ranking, something must trickle to the bottom.  While this album is great, and would be a killer album for any other band, it is not one of Starflyer’s best.  It reminds me of life in LA (even though I didn’t move there until 2002 or 2003), probably because of the drives we would take in the desert, and the album cover which happens to be – a desert shot.  My brain works predictably like that.

Can’t Stop Eating EP, 2002.

A great EP, but it doesn’t punctuate any specific points in memory.  It has the distinction of having the first “cover” on an actual Starflyer disc (there was one on the Greatest Hits disc) – West Coast Friendship was originally done by Bon Voyage.  Buutttttt Bon Voyage happens to be Jason’s band with his wife, so he probably wrote the song anyway and it isn’t specifically a cover.  But technically it still is, as it turned up on the Bon Voyage album first.   To me it has the sensesound of Leave Here a Stranger + Americana.  Since I said Leave Here a Stranger was a bit like Americana as well…this is a small step further in that direction,  into a more noticeably “starflyer-y” Starflyer.

Live at the Paradox EP, 2002.

Stands out in memory because we (Jen & I) picked it up at the first Starflyer show I’d made it to in a long time – at the Peter (on Henry, I forget) Fonda theatre in LA.

Old, 2003.

I picked this up at the same show – which happened to be the Old “release party”.  It was an awesome show, they played with Pedro the Lion and some cheesy band I’ve long since forgotten.  Old was the first “great” album (IMHO), since Fashion Focus  (and hopefully not the last, my jury is still out on the greatness of Talking Voice vs. Singing Voice).  This is the album Jen and I blasted while cruising the dead empty streets of Phoenix, AZ on a warm summer night.  We drove for an hour or two up and down the long stretches of suburban desert sprawl – it was incredibly mellowing and we still look back on those memories happily.  The sound is somewhat predictable, just in the sense that it is another step in the progression I’ve been mentioning – mixing the best parts of the past and improving on others.  It’s noticeably like Everybody Makes Mistakes, but you can also hear pieces of the new sounds brought in (and then left dormant for 2 albums) with The Fashion Focus.

It’s great, solid album that manages quite well to merge Jason’s shoegazer sensibilities of the past with his burgeoning  pop influences.  It also directly (in the sense that the lyrics were easily audible) addressed many factors of getting old: marriage, age, lack of acknowledgement of his 10 years of musical accomplishments.

I am the Portuguese Blues, 2004.

This is an odd goose.  I didn’t like it at all (well, at all for Starflyer, which means I still thought it was brilliant, just not up to par) when I first heard it, but it has grown on me.  I think I heard a rumor somewhere about the songs being left over from the Gold sessions…and it a sense some of them sound like Gold on crack, or perhaps Gold + Old.  Ahh, ok I googled it, it was supposed to be released btw. Americana & The Fashion Focus.  That makes more sense.  It shares a similar sound to Americana & Gold, but the songs in general are played at a much faster pace than previous SF work.  There are more sort of “blah” songs here without something to make them really special and a step above the standard that I sort of mentally zone out on – in that sense it is like Leave Here a Stranger.   I haven’t even listened to it enough to have the songs on this album memorized!  It just never stuck with me, I go back and listen to it every so often to try and figure out why I didn’t/don’t like it, and it just never sticks.

Of particular note is the return to form of a solid color for the album cover.  Considering the dating of the material, it makes sense, but I’m very surprised he chose a color so similar to Silver’s.  They look the same to me, although I guess maybe this one is bluer?  I would have thought a slightly more periwinkly blue would have been good.  (Yes, I know what color periwinkle is!).

Never Play Covers, 2004.

A recording of a live show that I picked up in 2005 at a show on the Talking Voice vs. Singing Voice tour.  Primarily songs from Portuguese Blues (and they do sound good live), with splashes from Old, Fashion, & Mistakes.

Talking Voice vs. Singing Voice, 2005.

Andy happened to have an advance copy of this he gave to me, because I’m probably the biggest  SF fan he knows…that or just because he thinks I’m cool (shhhh don’t tell him!).  I did indeed buy a second copy though as soon as it came out so I could have all the decorations and such J.  A nice solid album that doesn’t stray too far from the Old formula of mixing the past and present, but the guitars seem to take more from the simplicity and cleanness of Stranger than the fuzz of Old.  We (Jen & I) saw them on the tour for this album at a tiny coffee house run by some church in Vancouver, WA.  I think there are some pictures  & show commentary in an old blog entry.  A great show and a great album – the audience was small enough that we got to say a few words to Jason again after the show (the LA show was too big for this I think).  Music critics like to be stupid (and jealous that they can’t make music themselves) and say things like “follows same formula as previous album” is a bad thing.  Well, if the previous album was fucking brilliant, and this one is too – how is that a bad thing.  Silly critics, thoughts are for thinkers!  I don’t think it’s quite as strong as Old, but it’s a good one.  This is the “Portland Starflyer album” to me – the first album to come out since our move here AND we saw them on that tour, so this album is about Portland, and growing up and getting along, to me.

And with that we’ve come full circle (13 years) to the current album:

My Island, 2006.

I’ve only listened to it once, so no solid opinions yet.  So far I’m feeling energy & guitar chops from Portuguese blunted (in a good way!) by the pop from Talking Voice.  I’m thinking it will be about on par with Talking Voice, I’m not getting the same kind of warm fuzzy I got from Old & Fashion Focus, etc.  The song Pearl of Great Price may have fallen into the trap of trying to wrap a song around an awkward phrase…  The video for I Win is um…kinda meh.  The kid playing the singer needs lots of lip syncing practice if he’s ever going to make it in a Milli Vanilli World.

[UPDATE:

It never grew on me, nor did the follow-up album "Dial M" (or something like that) - sadly I think that I or SF59 have outgrown the other.   Dial M will be my last "buy on sight" SF album *sniffle*.  I think the sound has gotten a bit too "light" for me, among other things.  I miss the fuzz and the mess of the early discs, and the lazy driving comfort of the middle discs.  The more recent ones seem to have a bit too much... syrup or honey or something for me.  It's hard for me to put my finger on it, but something is definitely not meeting my standards.

I'm frustrated by the growing apart thing, but hey - he put out two handfuls of albums that I really enjoy to this day, so... there is that.  Maybe someday our paths will cross again.

/UPDATE]

Favorite to least favorite albums:

1. Fashion Focus
2. Old
3. Gold
4. Silver
5. Americana
6. 3 way tie: Talking Voice vs. Singing Voice vs. Leave Here a Stranger vs. Everybody Makes Mistakes
7. My Island
8. Portuguese Blues
9. stuff after “My Island”

Tags: me, Starflyer 59

This entry was posted by onefinemess on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 11:47 am and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.