  Novocain for the
Soul
A CD Review
By Gail Worley
Starflyer 59
Everybody Makes Mistakes
(Tooth & Nail Records)
I remember the
summer of 1996 like it was yesterday. The Eels
had a popular song that was all over the radio
and MTV. It wasn't your typical light-hearted,
happy fun summer song about love or sunshine or
getting-down or whatever. This oddly appealing,
quirky song called "Novocain for the
Soul" was a dark, bare bones metaphor for a
deep, life-shattering pain that is much too
difficult to revisit. The chorus alone could
haunt you to madness if you let it.
"Novocain
for the soul/
You better give me something to fill the hole/
Before I sputter out"
With a thorazine
tempo and biting sardonic lyrics like "Jesus
and His lawyers/Are coming back,"
"Novocain for the Soul" probably made a
lot of people uncomfortable. To me, it was
plaintive and beautiful and spoke specifically to
a situation that was going on in my life at the
time. Judging from the buzz created by
"Novocain for the Soul," I'd bet this
song connected with a lot of people who were
looking for ways to fill the hole in their soul
before they either went completely numb or just
took themselves out. When a song triggers this
kind of emotional catharsis, that is when a band
begins to sell a lot of records. Music becomes
the balm that heals the wounds no one can see.
Unfortunately,
we also have the phenomena of what the LA
post-punk band, X, called The Unheard Music:
bands who make brilliant records, but who fail to
gain much exposure. These bands either continue
to struggle in the underground, hoping for a
break (remember that REM made half a dozen
records before they ever had a chart hit) or they
give up and disappear completely. Most of the
records on my year-end list fall under the
category of the unheard music. This helps to
illustrate the huge dichotomy between what is
considered to be "best" by individual
tastes and what is "popular" according
to the mainstream, or lowest common denominator.
Starflyer 59 are
a band from Orange County, California -- a region
famous for punk rock, Disneyland and conservative
Republicanism-- who make the unheard music.
They've been at this "make a record/tour the
country" thing for most of the 90's. Chances
are you've never heard of them, and that is just
a shame. Everybody Makes Mistakes, the
band's fifth full length release, is an
inter-album referential collage of songs that are
individually eclectic, yet unified by Starflyer
59's instantly identifiable sound. Often compared
to critical/cult favorites, My Bloody Valentine,
for their woozy, shoe-gazer melodies and
introspective lyrics, Starflyer 59
singer/guitarist/ring leader, Jason Martin,
clearly draws from a lifetime of influence and
experience. Martin's songs reflect universal
ruminations of rejection and loss, joy and
discovery with a seeming effortlessness and
startling vulnerability. The sullen mood of
"Play the C Chord" -- syrupy slow and
seductively gloomy -- is offset almost
immediately as it segue's into the
brave-new-frontier feel of "No New Kinda
Story" -- a deceptively upbeat song that
sounds much like the first post-Joy Division
efforts of New Order, as haunted by the ghost of
Ian Curtis. Other phantom muses appear in the
dark, carnival atmosphere of "No More
Shows," where the spirit of Jim Morrison
meets Marc Bolan somewhere on Love Street.
Martin owes a
debt to Eric Carmen's "All By Myself"
as he speaks of the "20 Dollar Bills"
that never change your life, giving shape to
thoughts and feelings of being trapped in a
survival cycle, and the frustration and
hopelessness that goes along with that. Right in
the middle of everything, the melancholy,
pastoral, "Just Try" (insert personal
crisis of your choice here) puts an upswing on
the wistful mood blanketing the work as a whole.
The songs are all lyrically unspecific enough to
represent any number of personal situations. In
this way, Starflyer 59 is invested in taking the
listener on a journey to the destination of one's
own choosing and Martin knows you can't phone
that job in. When he sings "You know we're
going places/They don't want to go" on the
minimal, gorgeous, "Going Places" it
feels almost like a promise of salvation.
Starflyer 59's
fifth album could be the one that lifts this
exceptional band from cult status to greater
recognition, from the realm of the unheard music
to the music that changes lives. But it probably
doesn't matter to Jason Martin if he sells 1,000
copies of Everybody Makes Mistakes or 10
million. Starflyer 59 will keep making pithy,
gorgeous, almost hallucinatory pop music, and
people will either get it or they won't. It is
the struggle that makes the man.
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