Albums are graded on a five-point scale of "Awful-Eh-Good-Great-Classic". I'm highly biased, so don't take it too seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Starflyer 59

[#] Americana (1997)

Black Sabbath fronted by a wimp.

Reviewed July 1, 2024

My album summaries are usually word salad, but this one has some lore attached. Jason Martin has a story about the recording of Americana where he described the album-to-be as having "a few Black Sabbath riffs"—leading the CCM community, for whom that band likely still carried some kind of weight, to dub Americana Starflyer's Black Sabbath album. You can imagine such music journo bullshit conjecture inspiring the ever-laconic lyrics of the record, this time more scornful than usual: "You don't worship me/You leave me out". "All we talk is vain/What about the Name?/You keep talking everything/Ruining the scene". Jason's message is clear: the Beatles are bigger than Jesus, we're just guys in a band, and you're not making Christianity better, you're just making rock and roll worse. (It's a shame he'd yet to learn to spit true bile vocally.)

If Americana is third place among Starflyer's monochrome trilogy, it's only for a lack of variety. This is a band that's learned well how to sharpen the smother of fuzz from Gold to a fine point, dialing back the layers and upping the guitar soloing. The simultaneously ballsy and dreamy attack gets mighty fine results while it's on, though it's hard to remember any of it in particular when "Harmony" and "The Translator" register about the same in your head, making a band that never produced much of a binaural buffet to begin with seem that much more one-note. It's the two tracks that follow the sonic template of Gold's comedown closer "One Shot Juanita", "You Think You're Radical" and "Help Me When You're Gone", where sensation lingers. These marinate in buzzy, gentle Wurlitzer tones, brushed drums, and reverberated clean guitars and achieve a downbeat down-bad emotional vibrancy the rest of the material doesn't—perhaps signaling to Jason where Starflyer needed to go, and ultimately did go, next.