Snap Crackle Pop

Stars Like Fleas - I Was Only Dancing (mp3) (buy)

If you're at all like me - and if you are, support group meets Tuesday, bring cupcakes - your first thought after pressing that Play arrow up there was that it couldn't change into a Stop square soon enough.  Montgomery Knott doesn't sound like he was expecting the song to start, or like he's ever tried that falsetto before.  Get back to me when you're ready, go home and practice, take two, next.

Atalllikemes of the world are advised to stick with it.  A lot of what makes Shannon Fields' and Knott's gentle, noodley Brooklyn collective Stars Like Fleas (myspace) a good listen is that they stumble into, and around, and sometimes right past their songs.  "Dancing" is a lot less interesting when it comes together into its soaring happyshit chorus about sunshine or something (there's tambourine, of course).  This stuff isn't about waiting for inspiration to strike.  And it's not some sort of pointillistic journey-as-destination meant to congeal into a whole.  Just go soaking in it and hope your moods match.

What I like best about that song kicks around its edges.  The Americana instrumentation - the banjo, lap steel, fiddle (and it's played like a fiddle, not one of the 101 dull, earnest strings currently saturating Indiedom).  The weird way how, after the song should have ended, Knott comes back sounding like Eddie Vedder.  I'm less about the airy anthem and more about grounded fills.

Wanted to go "Dancing" first just as evidence that there are some songs on the band's latest record, The Ken Burns Effect, and there are more single-ready indie rock tracks ("Berbers in Tennis Shoes," "You Are My Memoir").  There's also the requisite amount of improvisatory dickingaroundness, which can be wildly hit-or-miss.  Submitted as a positive example:

Stars Like Fleas - Early Riser (mp3) (buy)

(Watch out.  It starts tea-kettle screechy.)

Okay, love this.  Could be operating under the power of suggestion, but the piece perfectly captures a state of morningness.  There's both a pre-caffeinated haze and an early hour crispness.  The la-la-las might be precious and xylophone might be too-obvious.  But there's something so unassuming and intimate about the piece.  One leg at a time.  It feels like a genuine private moment, and if you're not warming to it immediately perhaps that because I'm using it right now, wait your turn.

A spiritual cousin:

Pink Floyd, "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast" (div'd into two parts)

Atom Heart Mother existed solely for its titular Suite, a brass-riffed prog slog that filled the album's first side.  (And I love the Suite, don't get me wrong.  Post-pubescent me can still avoid stepping back and acknowledging that much of the band's determinations toward bombastic profundity were sorta silly.  I don't just admire or scoff at the effort, I get into that shit.)    Everything else is B material, though after weathering a twenty-three minute-plus piece it's nice to run into something as simple and unnecessary as "If" or "Fat Old Sun."

"Breakfast," though, has always been filler.  Thirteen minutes of dabbling, bridged by sounds of Floyd roadie Alan Stiles talking about, preparing, eating his Wheaties.  Some tinkering would pay off later, better; sounds like Gilmour's center section was a slide rehearsal for "Fearless," and less-specific (and therefore, again, pseudo-profound) captured chatter would enhance Dark Side of the Moon.

The last bit still feels a bit much for this time of day, but the first two-thirds are peaceful and unassuming and funny.  Stars Like Fleas gets the job done better in a quarter of the time, which is good, because you've got places to go and shit to do and no time to waste listening to a goddamn roadie masticate.

Pop tarts who crave sugar on their grits, here's your up'n@em:

Matthew Sweet - Morning Song (mp3) (buy)

2003's Kimi ga suki * Raifu was recorded quickly, at home, with Richard Lloyd and Greg Leisz ("essentially making this a Girlfriend-era line-up," Sweet notes in the CD booklet, though, um, Robert Quine, sigh).  It was meant to be a Japan-only release, and was for a while, but wound up being way too good for that.  "Morning" is a direct and lovely bit of carpe diem, looks to the light, refuses to loose its shadow.

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Before writing this entry, I bent at the waist in a ninety-degree angle and flapped my arms in a mighty condor-aping motion.  Just so you know.

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"Sounds like a horn full of mayonnaise."

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Keith Richards has really let himself go. (via)

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Have been enjoying the variety over at floodwatchmusic.

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Also, this Girl Talk essay.

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And no, this is not me.  Like, duh.  I have at least one too many blogs as it is.

tags: stars like fleas  matthew sweet  pink floyd  

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