posted 09/27/2008 (Sat) @ 08:00 am
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Starfucker - Starfucker (2008)
Synth Pop / Bitpop / Indie
The Dude Would Abide, Man…
- Florida
- German Love
- Myke Ptyson
- Laadeedaa
- Rawnald Gregory Erickson The Second
- U Ba Khin
- Holly
- Hard Smart Beta
- Pop Song
- Miss You
- Isabella Of Castile
A far cry from the Carly Simon plagiarizing, ham-fisted Nine Inch Nails track of the same name, wannabe ironic/risque bedroom recordists Starfucker punt near a dozen clunky, lo-fi but syrupy-warm pop gems our way for their laid-back, if not family-titled, debut. Homemade Casiotones, fuzzy drum machines and occasional flimsy acoustic guitar meet Rob Crow vox halfway for this fun, head-bobbing collection of tunes strong on hooks and short on words, just the way the doctor ordered.
The anesthetized bounce of “Florida” sets the tone for the record and steers everyone in just the right laid-back, gateway-drugged direction. As an added bonus, it finishes with the most hilarious wordplay on the entire album, a Monty Python-ish voice-over filtered as if through a dying record player:
“How much wiggle is *a* wiggle? Well, you have to draw the line somewhere. So people come to some sorts of agreements about, uhh, how much of a wiggle… is a wiggle. That is to say, a thing. One wiggle. One can always reduce any one wiggle into sub-wiggles. Or see it as a subordinate wiggle in a bigger wiggle. But there’s no real fixed rule about it…”
Something like this emerges from a bedroom studio every once in a blue moon to greet hipsters with fistfuls of indie street cred, usually sporting some kind of almost-clever name (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, anyone?), only to be forgotten in a few months. Questions of longevity aside, though, it’s the present that matters, and right now, the simple pleasure of sloppy falsetto harmony and delicious keyboard portamento (as in the aptly-named “Pop Song”) is too delectable to pass up. Starfucker get all their portions right, too: “Hard Smart Beta” cooks in just under two minutes. Accessibility-wise, the absurdly-named “Myke Ptyson” pogos around on a snappy, “save the princess” type riff that sounds like it might’ve flown out of a pre-Gameboy handheld’s speaker. That should tell you what you need to know.
All it takes is a taste, and you’re hooked. You might not remember the specifics later, but that’s not always a bad thing. Starfucker just begs for repeat performances. Especially so on the icy cool and irresistable, slippy-slide bitpop of closer “Isabella of Castile.” They know they should go, but they want to stay. Picture Pinback with Nintendo controllers in hand in lieu of guitars, and you’ve got these dudes. Awesome for when nothing deathly serious will get the job done, and chilling out is priority numero uno. And when isn’t that the case, really?
Tags: bedroom rockers, best of 2008 candidates, bitpop, chill out, fun, geek, indie, pop, sloppy
2 comments on this article
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evanbrown Says:
October 5th, 2008 at 10:56 amthat monty-python voice you described is an old lecture from a buddhist named alan watts.
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threestarsmash Says:
October 5th, 2008 at 4:12 pmInteresting. Taken out of context and warped as it is, the Alan Watts voice-over is remarkably hilarious on this recording…
