Review Summary: Old school shoegaze with a few surprises
The inherent simplicity of this record doesn't provide a lot of discussion, but it's
designed as a Christian version of Lush, Loveless, Ride, Swervedriver, etc. Gospel aside,
religious music is usually flagged down as musically deficient in favor of it's lyrics,
even though that nature of disregard can be applied to any type of music. Lots of musicians are
poisoned by unoriginality or non-music related reasons like women, money or all things
related to party culture, but in this case, Jesus. This preface could be seen as unrelated
because a lot of songs aren't explicitly about faith but it's one of Christian
label Tooth and Nail Records' first and most famous non-pop releases.
It's safe to assume Jason Martin is partly singing about a love interest ("Blue Collar Love",
"The Zenith", "Happy Days are Here Again" & "She Only Knows") while others are
seemingly metaphor driven to suggest the focus of someone fallen out of grace with God in
need of his love ("Sled" & "The Dungeon"). Lyrically, compared to the ballads he would
later go on to record, this is noise for the sake of being noise. On the surface that goes for
the instrumentation too.
On Silver, Starflyer 59 defines their signature guitar sound of going back and forth from
metal tinged barre chords to picking textbook dream pop notes soaked in reverb all over
massive layers of distortion. The prevalent underlying heaviness is contrasted by Jason's
borderline lethargic and dreary vocal delivery. Which works well with topics like "She Only
Knows" being about a girlfriend relieving him of tragedy related emotional pain. His
intentionally lazy singing especially makes sense on the songs delicately describing
his worship of god ("Droned", "Second Space Song", "Hazel Would" & "Monterey").
