Gentle Intoxication – Stars Like Fleas, Sun Lights Down on the Fence
Stephanie R. Myers
formed by Montgomery Knott (vocals) and Shannon Fields (multi-instrumentalist)
in 1998 and their first record, Took the Ass for a Drive
style=’font-family:Verdana’> remains unreleased. For Sun Lights Down on the
Fence, Stars spent almost two
years collecting hours of sonic material, and Praemedia’s gamble on the album
ended up being a chance worth taking.
Initially liquid and docile, the environments created by the group don’t
stay passive for long. They dance on the brink of oblivion and gently pull
back. The lyrical liner notes read like a stream-of-consciousness poetry
reading, but they accompanies the smooth musical landscapes punctuated with
slap-in-the-face lyrics like “he’ll fuck you as hard as you want.”
style="mso-spacerun: yes">
It would be tempting to
define Stars Like Fleas’ style as a brand of free jazz, but the album is even
parts Coldplay’s pop melody sensibility (Knott’s vocals are especially akin to
Chris Martin’s) mixed with a bit of Ornette Coleman. “You could say Stars Like Fleas is a project very interested
in exploring genre, but not itself a genre project,” Fields said, in an e-mail
interview. “We don’t set out in some programmatic academic sense ‘to make
interrogative music that takes pop music as a subject,’ but we do try to get to
a place where we forget everything we know about music (impossible) and try to
get to do something that feels right and true, even if it ‘sounds wrong.’”
Sun Lights
style=’font-family:Verdana’> is a mild-meets-wild microcosm of sound, less of a
self-described “experiment” than a gentle, warm intensity. But the experimental
music genre is a still-developing one, and while Knotts sees the genre
developing “more woodwinds and beats,” Fields sees the future of band making
“‘broken’ music that feels right.” And maybe a little more chaos in the midst
of order. “What drives me is making
sense of the world and myself, and making nonsense of the sense that others
force on you,” she said.
Consumers and critics used
to define “prog-rock” in the Rush vein, an upsurge of Today’s Tom Sawyers all
detonating together. But while there was really no rhyme or reason to the
classification there, if there was a redefinition of what progressive music is
(or rather, what music progressing
sounds like) in this decade, it might sound a lot like Stars Like Fleas,
steadily progressing toward something furtive but majestic.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> There is a danger here: as Frank Zappa
once said, “The manner in which Americans ‘consume’ music has a lot to do with
leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their
lifestyles, like the score of a movie-it’s consumed that way without any regard
for how and why it’s made.”
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> He may have been on to something, but
in the case of Stars Like Fleas, the wallpaper effect, as it were, might have
been mildly intentional; and Zappa, an avant-garde composer himself, was
probably right after all. These are musicians painting gentle musical
landscapes in every sense of the word., and if wallpaper is allowed to be as
pleasantly intoxicating as this, there’s nothing shameful about it.
