Starsailor - All The Plans

(Muso's Guide, March 13, 2009)

Album review

If anyone has been holding their breath for the new Starsailor record, here’s some exciting news for your respiratory system.

Four years since the last, James Walsh and his compadres have emerged from their recording cocoon with a long-player which does nothing to break down social barriers but plenty to soothe your ailing record collection, rife with passion and sex and all that dangerous stuff. Starsailor are here to blandify everything!

Sorry, that is needlessly cruel and playground bullyish.

In truth, Walshy’s familiar warble striking up on opener ‘Tell Me It’s Not Over’ is a welcome sound. His voice exudes a mournful quality which makes the fool of expressionless vocalists like Julian Casablancas or Bob Dylan - adding exuberant expression to the simplest of lyrics, and marking Starsailor out from their contemporaries.

‘Boy In Waiting’ starts up like ‘Unchained Melody’ and offers an over-appreciation of sleighbells, but by the time ‘The Thames’ kicks in, there’s a real sniff of rock in the air. A twangy guitar that would make Duane Eddy blush, awash with James’ melancholy, “Is love just a big mistake/Just a risk that we all take/Trying to keep the blues away” - as a track, it is really strong, but there’s unfortunately nothing that makes it a possible single release.

The title track boasts some of the delicious flavour of their 2001 debut Love Is Here, the band’s strongest record, while ‘Hurts Too Much’ is the ‘Alcoholic’ of this outing, jampacked with loss and heartache, explaining, “We all get burned sometimes”.

The joke of this all is that bands like Starsailor and Embrace laid the hefty foundations in emotional rock, which made it possible for young pups like Keane and Snow Patrol to scamper in and appropriate it for themselves, so now the old guard have to fight for their position.

Speaking of which, it would be remiss not to point out that Starsailor have been taking notes at the Keane series of lectures on ‘The Gravity of Piano’, adding portent and knowing to the first bars of ‘Tell Me It’s Not Over’ with pounded ivories.

The woozy, boozy piano of ‘Change My Mind’ is all their own, as is the miserable ‘Stars And Stripes’ - more’s the pity because lyrically it’s a bit of a horror, invoking patriotism gone awry, “Stars and stripes won’t keep you warm at night/Keep those evil empires from your door’”.

By and large, Starsailor - more so than Embrace - display a skill at ‘this sort of thing’, and in Walsh, they have some of the most interesting and creative vocal work around, this year or any year.

But it all seems just a little bit limp, and there’s nothing on display here that will make you a fan if you weren’t already, you can breathe easy on that.