Review: Dejame Dormir, Starflyer 59
This new album from Starflyer 59 was completely unexpected. The title translates to ‘Let me sleep’, and these are songs from the band’s catalogue recreated as lullabies.
It has been common since the 1990s for artists to make acoustic versions of songs, and the idea of pop songs as lullabies is not unique – there are novelty albums of well-known songs recreated as lullabies, often tongue-in-cheek, but it is unusual for an artist to do it themselves. It could be argued that the at-times glacial pace of some of Starflyer’s music could put you to sleep, but you wouldn’t exactly put it on to send a baby to sleep.
Jason Martin, who is basically Starflyer 59, is a stalwart of the American west coast/Tooth and Nail/alternative Christian music scene, who since the 1990s has been ploughing on with making music while simultaneously running a trucking business. His musical style has moved through shoegaze and into New Wave territory (and back again) and he has seemed unafraid to try whatever tickles his fancy, even if that category seems fairly limited. But this album seems like a major step sideways. Or is it?
Opener ‘Major Awards’ (originally on 2003’s Old) certainly announces itself as something different, with not much more than a melody sounding out on what sounds like an old-fashioned wind-up jewellery box. Likewise, ‘I Was 17’ (previously a B-side collected on Easy Come, Easy Go), sounds like harp over something like hammered dulcimer.
And so it goes. ‘New Guitar’, a recent composition with a typically strong New Order influence in its original iteration, is a bit jauntier, with marimba (?). ‘All My Friends Who Play Guitar’ gets a fuller treatment. It starts with a flute version of the melody, then shifts to glockenspiel or vibraphone or the like (seriously, I have no idea) and to languid guitar (a bit more like traditional Starflyer) all under fairy floss synthesiser clouds that drift across periodically, and over percussion that sounds like a clock ticking or water dripping on rocks rhythmically in a Japanese garden.
(I’m not sure who is playing all these instruments. Has Martin been learning percussion?)
‘This Recliner’, a song from 2000’s Miami EP, has moved from being vaguely Coldplay-like to like something on a Tim Burton movie soundtrack. ‘YZ80’, a very recent, nostalgic track about a motorbike, which was a return to a more shoegazer sound, doesn’t seem to have much of a melody and doesn’t initially suggest this kind of treatment. A song such as ‘Fell in Love at 22’, which, on the other hand, might well have been an obvious choice here, does not appear, but with such an extensive back catalogue, it would be a useless exercise to speculate why certain songs are not included. In fact, the song choices just add to the pleasant surprise of the whole package.
OK, it’s not entirely unprecedented. Martin has used chimes before, notably on the introduction to ‘The Brightest of the Head’ (from Dial M). And it could be argued that the guitar that shadows the vocal note-for-note on the Gold version of ‘One Shot Juanita’ has the same chiming quality as something like a xylophone; here it is merely stripped down. And if one were to describe the mood of the likes of the Leave Here a Stranger album, ‘dreamy’ is a descriptor that would sit high on the list.
The issue of how left-field this is aside, I was surprised by the fact that, despite not having heard some of these songs in years, the melodies were familiar. One might think that Starflyer 59’s appeal lies in Martin’s tone, but this is a reminder that there are some solid bones underneath the skin of the songs.
Nick Mattiske blogs on books at coburgreviewofbooks.wordpress.com and is the illustrator of Thoughts That Feel So Big.
