Review: Starling Electric - Clouded Staircase (8.3)

Overall Rating: 8.3 Lyrics: 8.0 Melodies: 8.3 Arrangements: 8.7 Thematicity: 7.8 Originality: 7.8 Production: 8.4

As strange as it may seem, in a year which has seen the final, inevitable stagnation of popular music in the United States in the face of stiff competition from Scandinavian, Canadian, and Japanese acts, Ann Arbor, Michigan is in the middle of a pop rennaisance, in which Starling Electric have played a large part. The band has deservedly built up a substantial reputation on the basis its live performances, which will likely be cemented by the release of this year's Clouded Staircase, the band's self-produced debut. Still, while the album is impressive for a variety of reasons, a word of caution is in order: this record isn't in any way an attempt to capture the feel of the band's live set, and I'd go as far as to say that the version of Starling Electric that appears on stage as a four-piece with a plethora of effects pedals and smoke machines is barely even recognizeable here. The arrangements are far more ornate, Caleb Dillon's voice, buoyed by echo effects, sounds completely different, and many of the album's inclusions are acoustic introspections rather than crowd-rousers, and even the band's most identifiable tunes ("The St. Valentine's Day Massacre," "Camp-Fire") have been completely reworked. Perhaps the strangest thing about this album is that it sounds almost exactly like later Guided by Voices (to an extent that I was actually able to trick die-hard Pollard fans into believing "To Flunker with Love" was an advance single from Normal Happiness), but as with Serena Maneesh's self-titled, it escapes sounding merely derivative and instead presents the listener with an interesting but unrealized possibility -- in this case, what Pollard's music might sound like nowadays if he bothered to arrange his material. Indeed, from the Zombies-esque "She Goes Through Phases" to the pure Pollard-ism of "Black Ghost/Black Girl," the arrangements are the best part of this album, and this is even more remarkable considering Clouded Staircase is self-produced.

As a whole, the record comes off less as a concentrated effort to realize a certain style or tell a story (despite what appears to be some vestigial thematic notochord in the form of multiple "Clouded Staircase" tracks) than it does the exploratory work of a band permitted to experiment with whatever instrumentation they want for the first time. Despite the Pollard influence and the short duration of the majority of the tracks, it still comes across as sprawling and vast. There is indeed a Guided by Voices album hidden in here somewhere, featuring such anthemic bursts as "New Era" and "Prince of the Puff of Smoke" (and my personal favorites, the frisson-inducing, guitar-propelled "All Through the Fall" and the out-and-out brilliant "To Flunker with Love"), but its tracks are interspersed with psych-pop fare like "A Snowflake" and "Death to Bad Dreams!/The Black Parade." For this reason, the album doesn't display a great deal of thematic unity, but to be fair, it's not really meant to; rather, it's about little touches that seem to have neither rhyme nor reason yet somehow succeed wildly like the organ and banjo intro to "Camp-Fire," the myriad subtle guitar effects employed on "She Goes Through Phases," or the unexpected acoustic simplicity of "Dust Chord." Lyrically, the album isn't bad, but it draws as heavily on Robert Pollard for inspiration for its words as for its music, which means it tends toward imagism and is built around majestic-sounding verbal catenations like "my electric saint" rather than an attempt to deliver any sort or message. This is a minor quibble however, and the only argument one could legitimately make against Clouded Staircase is that it borrows from Half-Smiles of the Decomposed-era GBV and the typical psych-pop sources du jour too much to be considered original, but I'd argue that the band's arrangements differentiate their material more than enough from that of their contemporaries (and even from those acts they have chosen to emulate) to make the album worthwhile, and that while it may seem a bit ufocussed at first listen, that's more due to a penchant for stylistic experiments (nearly all of which are successful) than any essential lack. Starling Electric have made an impressive record here, and the fact that it has a different sound from their live set only attests to the band's versatility.

-BT