There’s something charming about the sound of Blake Starkey. Like a cheerier Cure, with the same layers of sound—echoey keyboards, wall of sound guitars, clear, tenor vocals, and pounding drums. He created the album all by himself, which gave him the creative control to make it sound how he wanted. This album actually came after another album he was writing and recording and then scratched because he wasn’t happy with how it was turning out, he describes in his Bandcamp liner notes. If you think something’s not gonna work, creatively, then it probably won’t. But this is a successful grouping of seven songs, that soar and dip, both musically and lyrically. One, of a Gram Parson’s cover, that he satisfyingly fits to his own style of shoegaze dream pop.
Most of the songs deal in feeling and mood, ephemeral love and fantasy metaphors. “It’s the time of year when the flower dies,” he sings on the song, “6th of October.” “It’s the kind of night when the ghost will rise / Searching for the girl with the dancing eyes / Who could stay all day but leave next night.” Whether it’s the same girl or not, a love interest appears and disappears a number of times on the album, and he captures the longing and the heartbreak well.
The songs are twice as long as I expected them to be, though it might actually have been a strength of the songs, since I found myself wanting to hear where he’d go melodically, guitar-wise yet another time. It’s probably better for live settings to have longer songs as well, that you can rock out to and fill a couple hour set with. The most fully realized theme song on the record comes from the title track, “So Long, Babylon!” “In Babylon she cries in red / She pushes on although she is dead / And the wine falls from the fountains for us / In Babylon, there’s never enough.” “So long Babylon, looks like I’ll be moving on.”
Babylon could be a city where he lived, or a person that he knew, or just a state of mind. It is a bittersweet song taken from the Biblical city that wreaked such havoc on God’s people. “How sweet her songs go / The leaves they fall, the winds they blow.” It seems like we all must deal with the Babylons in our lives, be they political or spiritual, personal or universal, and it is a strength to leave something that has so much destructive sway over us.
We all long to be the heroes of our own stories and in a powerful song, “Holder of the Hearts,” Blake visits a gypsy decked out with cards and scattered bones who tells his fortune. “There beneath the stack of cards / Great holder of the hearts / Take my hand now / Fear not for your heart is gold.” The elements of fantasy story telling add a great deal to the record, do the important work of showing rather than telling, that moves the hearts of listeners to respond more deeply.
The album is a good length, especially since the songs are a bit longer. You get to know Blake’s unique sound, unique sense of story telling. It is satisfying to hear him close out the record with Gram Parson’s because it puts him somewhere in the world of music, somewhere that is surprising given his sound. And makes me wonder what other artists influenced his record. He explicitly said in the liner notes that this is NOT an album about 2020 or the pandemic, and it is a relief, as a reviewer, to take a break from thinking about comparisons. And a relief as a person, to enter a world completely of somebody’s making, apart from our own which is so turned upside down, so slowed down, like living in molasses, perhaps, by everything that’s going on. Give it a listen and see who you think he sounds like. It’s certainly a unique record.
Prism Reviews 