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

[#] My Island (2006)

Give the bassist some.

Reviewed July 9, 2024

Starflyer runs in stages. Heavy, angsty stage. Shiny new wave stage. Luscious, gentle, cynical stage. 2006, ten (!) albums in, it was time for a new one, and seemingly the most commercially canny yet. The mid-2000s were ripe times for the so-called "post-punk revival", bands like The Killers, the Strokes, and the Arctic Monkeys that played stripped down, "legit", often danceable rock music and really didn't have a lot in common otherwise. My Island adopts a lot of the characteristics of the post-punk revival, with the heavy drums, the faster tempos, the emphasis on the bass, but regardless of what it might've done for Starflyer's chart prospects (not a lot), it comes away one of the catchiest and most unique albums in their long line of them.

My Island sees the debut of longtime Starflyer bassist Steven Dail, and he owns this album as far as I'm concerned. His lines are melodic ("Nice Guy", "Division"), spiky ("Mic the Mic"), and occasionally even groovy ("It's Alright Blondie"), and where a lot of Starflyer records coast dreamily, these songs often rush towards their finish lines. Where it avoids commercial crassness isn't just in Jason Martin's consistently excellent songwriting, but also his wide-reaching sonic influences. The synth orchestras pop up plenty on songs like "Nice Guy", and his longtime interest in surf rock (seen back on Gold, even) means the sorta springy, bouncy indie rock fittingly featured on the title track is absolutely in his wheelhouse. The beach hasn't improved his lyrical outlook on his talents or the biz much, but that's only because we've all been sleeping on his band. Go listen.

[#] I Am the Portuguese Blues (2004)

As monochrome as its cover, but that's not an insult.

Reviewed October 16, 2018

By 2004, the Starflyer Motorcycle Club had dropped all pretenses of being a noisy rock outfit, with Leave Here a Stranger and Old channeling Beach Boys more than bloody valentines. Old habits die hard though, as do rediscovered post-Americana demos, and one needs only a single glance at the monochrome cover art to tell which cloth I Am the Portuguese Blues was cut from. It's a record that confused and divided newer SF59 fans, and to this day, holds a reputation as a weird step back for the band, a cock rock detour from greatness. Does it deserve it? I don't think entirely.

At first blush, I Am the Portuguese Blues is not exactly a brilliant exhibition of Jason Martin's songwriting ability. Many tracks follow the same general swagger of hawkish guitars and sneered vocals, and some songs, namely "The Big Idea" and "Not Funny", might as well be one track. This doesn't mean they aren't ridiculously catchy, though; songs like "Unlucky" and "Worth of Labor" work as well as a "Blue Collar Love" ever did, and with only one song lasting longer than three minutes, it's Pocket Starflyer. I Am the Portuguese Blues is nobody's favorite Starflyer record, but it's also not trying to be. It's just a pretty good bite-sized rock record from a couple guys up to the task. Worth a listen.

[#] Leave Here a Stranger (2001)

Mono musical magic.

Reviewed July 8, 2024

There's often one specific album in a band's catalog where they go for it. The Big One. The Ambitious One. Leave Here a Stranger is Starflyer's Ambitious album, a mono throwback with Jason Martin's childhood hero, Daniel Amos' Terry Scott Taylor, running the boards, as completely out of step with then-contemporary (or even our contemporary) music as the Starflyer himself felt with his own music career. "All My Friends Who Play Guitar", "When I Learn to Sing", "Night Music"—yeah, it's music about music, but it's more than that. It's a record about inadequacy in talent and in faith, about boredom in a life most conceive as exciting and high-flying, and about pleasure in the simple things at the end of the day. It's lush, as outwardly gentle as it is inwardly brave, and it might just be the best thing they've ever recorded.

The sonic brew Leave Here a Stranger concocts, of tambourines, handclaps, pizzicato strings, and shimmering keys, piled like bedded leaves underneath clean-toned guitars and leads and, of course, Jason's breathy chest vocals, isn't just singular in the Starflyer canon, it's singular anywhere else. Jason never lets the music explode as most artists would, the dread and ennui bleeding through in the details instead. To that end, "Give Up the War" simmers to embers in the desert sun as Jason contemplates Paul the Apostle's undying commitment to his missionary work, "I Like Your Photographs" is a midnight military march about finding your place in this strange country we Americans live in, and despite his strained relationship to the business, smack dab in the middle of the album, "Things Like This Help Me" is a warm embrace of community and music giving you a reason to press through it all. Absolutely sublime.

[#] Everybody Makes Mistakes (1999)

Singable cynicism.

Reviewed June 22, 2024

"We write the songs you like/In half the time", Jason Martin drones on Everybody Makes Mistakes' opener "Play the C Chord"—the other half of that refrain being "like it's something new". Every Starflyer album seems to come with its own flavor of engulfing cynicism, but that for music and the record industry sums half the catalog up, and it gets its start here on Everybody Makes Mistakes. You imagine, five albums in, the obstinately introverted, modest Martin, already having been through years of touring and interviews, two lineup changes, a flop album that became a beloved one, and the continued lack of breakthrough success despite an extensive catalog of alt-pop gems, has a certain viewpoint on music, but whatever that is, he thankfully doesn't let it bring his songwriting talents or performances down.

Everybody Makes Mistakes is rarely described as it is, the sonic bridge between the new wave synth-acoustic shininess of The Fashion Focus and the gentle, nocturnal meditation on making music that is Leave Here a Stranger. Pseudo-single "No New Kinda Story" leads with bright synth string swells and a four-on-the-floor drum machine pattern a la "I Drive a Lot", and the grainy, distorted riffs and bluesy leads on "No More Shows" and "A Dethroned King" bring to mind the shitkickin' Fashion Focus favorite "The Birthrite". On the other end of the spectrum, "The Party" suggests the hazy grandeur Starflyer would soon conjure on the climax of Stranger, "I Like Your Photographs". All of this reads like a band in flux, and, well, if you've read the Easy Come Easy Go booklet, they certainly were, but Mr. Martin always brings a lovely batch of catchy, unassuming tunes with him wherever he goes, and this outing is no different.

[#] The Fashion Focus (1998)

Cars whizzing past in the nighttime.

Reviewed April 28, 2018

Jason Martin is concerned with very little. He drives a lot, falls in love a lot, plays card games a lot. As Jason Martin is wont to do, he writes songs about these things, but in proving he's not indie's most eccentric songwriter, he proves he's indie's most economic. The leadoff track on Starflyer's The Fashion Focus, "I Drive a Lot", sums up the wistfulness that comes from being at the bottom in five lines over upbeat, strumming acoustics and prominent keyboards. The Fashion Focus is an exit ramp off from the genuinely heavy, loungy shoegaze that defined Silver and Gold. Chalk it up to aging gracefully or all-fundamentals songwriting, but this album stands tall alongside them.

The rest of the album keeps the steady, low-key, nighttime atmosphere, though Jason reminds us that he can still choke us with walls of guitars on "Too Much Fun". Some would call it out of place, and maybe that's true, but the songwriting is so consistent that it's hardly an issue. Elsewhere, Jason writes the finest Christmas in July song ever laid to tape ("A Holiday Song"), likens the dark to death in the catchiest way possible ("Sundown"), and gets in his traditional one awkward Christianity reference per album ("Days of Lamech"). If there's anything Jason's songs lack, it's usually endings—"All the Time" is a chorus looking for a song, and a mind-numbing refrain to match the road he's been on for the last couple of hours.

[#] 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.

[#] Le Vainqueur (1995)

Three par excellence sadcore tunes and no more.

Reviewed June 19, 2024

Much like how Silver had a companion EP in She's the Queen, Gold gets the equivalent treatment with Le Vainqueur. Given that Gold is a lot more, uh, dire of an album though, don't expect the freewheeling, experimental redos and castoffs from that EP. These songs frankly outdo Gold in leadenness, absolutely oppressive with their heaviness and isolation, and unfortunately you only get three of them. More telling is that the title track, an explosive epic bookended with the sounds of creaking, shearing metal by way of guitar feedback, features twice, once in full and the second in a hasty radio edit that trims the release of the first four minutes of buildup. That's your cue this is a glorified single—but it is a very, very good single.

"These days on my own/So why'd you ask when I'm lonely for her?" Jason whispers buried in a roar of guitars tuned to the key of pure misery, a bassy blast that makes "When No One Calls (It Will Be Alright)" both the medicine and the spoonful of sugar that helps it go down. "The Starflyer 2000 Reprise" is even more bittersweet, a re-recording of the unfortunately-titled "Leigh and Me"—done after Jason's separation from Sixpence None the Richer's Leigh Nash. Jason's aching, gravelly vocals might not be as pretty as Leigh's smooth croon, but the added shaky sighs in the refrain make it all the more emotionally potent. The Goodbyes Are Sad/Next Time Around single really should've included to give this thing a little more meat, but if you don't mind the lack of runtime, Le Vainqueur makes for some of the finest mope music around.

[#] Gold (1995)

Starflyer are near to the brokenhearted.

Reviewed June 29, 2023

I can only imagine how deranged Gold sounded when it came out. The smother of rumbling guitars, shrieking, agonized feedback, tremolo leads that tremble like a nervous breakdown—counteracted by bone-dry 70's drums and Jason Martin's anti-loud vocals, whispered like the man's dying in front of you. I cannot think of another album that has a sonic profile like Gold. This was the product of a sick mind left to record an album effectively by his lonesome, the kind who hasn't seen the sun all month, and the song titles sound like the self-absorbed castigating you do when you're sick and navelgazing. "Stop Wasting Your Whole Life", "When You Feel Miserable", "Messed Up Over You". I could certainly relate when I found it.

Though the thick, almost cinematic smog of guitars and ear-splitting feedback freakouts are draws all their own, Gold's gentler and poppier moments are just as striking. "You're Mean" strikes a spring reverb-loaded 60s surfy tone, and "Somewhere When Your Heart Glowed the Hope" has a cautious optimism to it that makes it one of my favorites across the entire Starflyer catalog. Though it's usually pretty simple lyrically (my friend sushi once described Gold as effectively instrumental in practice), the low-key closer "One Shot Juanita" offers the sharpest, most depressed and resigned line on the entire project: "Time's only wasted when you know like I know/The past times weren't the better times at all". This could've easily been maudlin mush, but by letting the guitars do the wailing, Starflyer comes out with an ideal soundtrack for anyone's moping.

[#] She's the Queen (1994)

Extras, extras! Read all about 'em!

Reviewed June 16, 2024

A little thing to tide the more hardcore fans over while Jason Martin spent 1995 killing himself for his art, She's the Queen is the often-forgotten companion EP to Silver, compiled of album outtakes and novelty reworkings of a handful of its tracks. (Of course, when I say little, I actually mean only six minutes shorter than its parent LP.) She's the Queen is fun. Some of the outtakes, like the title cut, were cut for a reason, but a couple rock in spectacular fashion, and the reworkings prove Starflyer's interests and inspirations lie a bit deeper than the Swervedrivers and My Bloody Valentines they're often pegged to be. It's a neat curiosity!

Among the cut tracks, I can't help but love "Canary Row"'s mind-numbing simplicity, and "Salinas" is a big favorite of mine. Starflyer would become quite well known for their lonely mope rock with Gold, and "Salinas" is lyrically cut from that cloth, but with Silver's sonics. (Put it next to "Indiana" and you'll hear what I mean.) If you're not just interested in Silver cast-offs, though, cast your gaze towards the reworkings. "Monterey" goes lounge with an arrangement that puts the groove on the bass (sadly, no Jason lounge lizard impersonation), "Droned" gets transformed into a forlorn slowcore track, and Jason's brother Ronnie gets in a bleepy-bloopy Joy Electric synthpop rendition of "Blue Collar Love"! If you loved Silver, you'll get a kick outta this one—but for non-fans, I'd start with one of their less esoteric, in-jokey records.

[#] Silver (1994)

The hazy one that looms over them all.

Reviewed June 16, 2024

"Alternative music doesn't exist. Shoegazer music has been dead since 1991." Sharp words from a guy who, by that point, had already been through the ups and downs of the record business, just not the pop one—the Christian one. Silver continues to be Starflyer 59's big record, The One that looms over all The Others, one of the progenitors of 90s Chrindie, and the album that continually gets the band labeled shoegazers and MBV disciples despite all the other wrinkles to their sound. I think this has a lot to do with Starflyer's discography being so large and covering so much sonic ground—they are what you want them to be. (Plenty of their disciples also misrepresent their sound; no, the band did not abandon guitar distortion with The Fashion Focus, sorry.) So for a would-be Starflyer fan, how do you reconcile these two worlds? Are they even really Christian?? (You get one line about Jesus on the whole project.)

Start with the source. Jason Martin is the same Jason Martin whether he's laid over top moody Wurlitzers, surf guitar, or shivery tremolo feedback. His vocals are whisper-thin, highly understated, and his songs are always built of sturdy, in this case metal-edged, chords and simple, melodic lead lines that gets stuck in your head easily. Where Silver stands out in their discography is its fogginess, heavy and stratospheric as a substitute for introversion. The production on here, courtesy of two members of Mortal (one of whom would go on to play guitar and keys for Switchfoot) is genuinely quite lush, and the slower songs, namely "Monterey" and "Droned", suit that and come away the real highlights. Is Silver a good starting point for a new fan? Well, it's damn good, that's the good part. Just don't get too attached to the fog machine.