Review Summary: Damn, Sputnik, did you sleep on OK Computer to?
If there was ever a band with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), Starfucker undoubtedly was it. The band's identity, and its music has always been fractured: on the one hand mild and airy guitar chords with just a hint of psilocybin, and on the other an almost overbearing electro synthpop. These might sound like two great tastes that go great together, and obviously if you've enjoyed Starfucker up to this point you'll agree with that sentiment, but it can't be overemphasised just how discordant these tastes really are.
Continuing the drug analogy one's a downer, and one's an upper. Nowhere is this dichotomy more evident than in their second album,
Reptilians, which until I saw the ratings was certain is their censual magnum opus. In less than a minute―and it feels a lot shorter―the album flips from a clean acoustic hook to an electronica assault on the senses. The following
Miracle Mile was their first truly self-assured album, a coming of age and maturity that my inner Patrick Bateman could dissect for hours, but it was also their worst received: such that
Being No One, Going Nowhere was musically a retreat back to their comfortable, established style. There they could safely stagnate. That's not to say the LP was bad, Starfucker's consistency is remarkable and Josh Hodges' eagerness to explore new themes is commendable and prevents the LP from ever turning repetitive. Seriously, just read the multi-paragraph description Hodges wrote for the LP's Bandcamp description.
But it was a misstep. It's an understandable misstep,
Miracle Mile doesn't lend itself as well to dance-sex parties the way their other work does and like all great things takes time to understand, to appreciate. How ironic, how appropriate that their true magnum opus should follow
Miracle Mile's lead.
There's term from Monomyth that I love for its pregnancy of meaning: apotheosis. It literally means deification, but I prefer to see it as the fullest form of self-actualization, the summit of the best and most developed of all possible yous. Or all possible Starfuckers, as it were. That's because when I think about this album, THAT's the term that keeps coming to mind. If
Miracle Mile was their coming of age, then
Future Past Life is their mastery.
This mastery didn't come from the aether, and yet again it's almost poetically appropriate the irony that the inspiration for Future Past Life came not from within like their other work, but without. Very without. Amsterdam without. Reading the wall of text to accompany this release (you didn't think Josh would abandon his muse after a single album, did you?) this album was born of a chance encounter between Josh and a pair of perfect strangers in Amsterdam. Within hours they were writing new songs, and the rest was―as they say―history.
The fruits of their collaboration represent a radical split from the Starfucker canon, but a unity of sound. Unity is the watchword, because here in unifying the fractured halves of Starfucker's sound they're finally unified into a seamless, flawless whole. For the first time the split halves of earthy music with real instruments have been unified with the immaculate, plastic synthpop electronica and I just can't emphasize the importance of this development enough. Now that the halves are no longer fighting with each other the music has a chance to really breathe, and in that breath it comes alive so many times, in so many moments.
Future Past Life feels so much like the album Josh wanted
Being No One, Going Nowhere to be. I would be remiss not to mention the complete separation from Alan Watts, whose lectures were first an integral, later perfunctory, now expunged facet of Starfucker's fractured identity. The absence of such a beloved thinker is an unmourned afterthought. Another casualty of Starfucker's maturity.
I like to think that one of Starfucker's greatest motifs has always been space, the vast endless expanse of the universe. Wonderous yet awe and dread inspiring to degrees incomprehensible. Nowhere do I feel the wonder of the infinite more than this LP. Anyone and everyone knows the problem with space intimately, even if they can't articulate it: the human brain can't comprehend anything bigger than a hill or farther than the horizon. It reels at the implication and rejects the notion without any further thought. A million stellar masses is no more than one, a hundred light years is no farther than a hundred miles. At a loaded march pace it would take the median human 17,703,421
lifespans to make the walk. And that means absolutely nothing to you. It's not even a far walk, no cool galaxies or black holes or even stars for yet hundreds to millions of times further. And it still means nothing. The human mind has one scale, and we resize all our experiences to match.
But there's brilliance in simplicity.
Future Past Life forces comprehension on you by contrasting the universal wonder of expansive synths with the tiny human joy of fresh air and a worn guitar. When he was writing
In the Attic of the Universe, Peter Silberman of The Antlers said he took solace in the size of the Universe. I don't pretend to understand what he meant by that, but I can feel it viscerally on this album.
And it's an album that carries its weight. I said before that Starfucker is a consistent band, but in the past they've been consistent near to a detriment. One of the great measures of the quality and
efficiency of an LP is how many times it fades to forgotten background noise whilst you listen, and every of Starfucker's albums up to now has had long stretches of mid album doldrums. Excepting the "Isabella of Castille" fluke every prior album's doldrums wouldn't end until it did.
Not here. The music refuses to be ignored. How could it, breathing right in your ear? There's movement and energy and tone changes, detours and digressions and oh my god, the ending. The movements of "Pink Noise" and "Cold Comfort" leave me desperate to feel feelings. And most desperate is the need to share this void with others.
