Stars Like Fleas

Stars Like Fleas: “I Was Only Dancing”

from The Ken Burns Effect (Hometapes)

gazebo gaze // Out June 3

(orig. Pub prob late mid-late May 2008)                        

The title of Stars Like Fleas’ third album might well have been inspired by Ken Burns’ response last summer to a query from Poynter.org’s Regina McComb, concerning the disciplined use of movement in manipulating  photographs. Burns: “As I became a filmmaker, I trusted that that still photograph to be a representation of a moment that was once very much alive…I not only looked at the photograph, I listened to it…you sit there…and suddenly compositional and other elemental tensions come into play, then perhaps holding even more permits the meaning that you’re intending to come through, or the meaning that’s inherent to come through.” Likewise, The Ken Burns Effect seems like the results of what musicians sometimes call the tale of the tape: especially here, composition includes listening to what’s been played, probably involving improvisation with differing but definite rules (“free verse is like playing tennis without a net,” but that can be worthwhile, like a fretless bass in the right hands). Then composition continues with editing the results, just a bit, as you catch the sound of people really listening to each other.  The process isn’t just employed by the artists, it includes them (“As I became a filmmaker…”), and anyone else who finds a way in.

 Gotta say, though, that, much as I respect and art-appreciate Stars Like Fleas’ microcosmic circus of a thousand concisely deployed instruments, where one missed cue can make the acrobat go splat, I can’t help wishing that would happen sometimes. Not that they seem anal, but their process is sometimes more appealing than its results, same as an unfettered jam band, so why not be that too, just once in a while? No, not like the finale, “Some Nettles”; it’s still too refined. Some (not too many) freakier sounds would increase their range, at least.

 But there are several tracks in which nebulae get pulled along by the insistent throb of anticipation, as wordsmith-crooner Montgomery Knott’s romantic haze finds itself easing around a certain comely silhouette. “I  Was Only Dancing” provides a good example, especially as it moves from the pangs of memory to a new encounter, and the bittersweet taste of the future, already seamlessly passing through. (Not that, as crooners go, Knott isn’t closer to Dave Matthews, John Mayer, and Jack Johnson than Frank Sinatra—but I never got much of anything like that “Dancing” vibe from the first three, to put it mildly.)