January 22-28, 2004

music

Come On, Get Happy

Wigan out: Starsailor sets a course for American exposure with their second CD, Silence Is Easy.

Starsailor is suddenly upbeat and ready for a little invasion.

by A.D. Amorosi

Starsailor?

It would be easy to think of this Wigan, England, quartet navigating the moonlight mile between their foggy, forlorn hometown heroes The Verve and the elegant grandeur of Coldplay. To those who follow all things Anglo, this band is the logical distention of the ringing Blur-Oasis crash of the late 1990s, wherein acoustic guitar-oriented acts making un-merry melodies topped the British charts.

"The press over there [in Britain] really is about "the movement,'" says singer/songwriter/guitarist James Walsh of Starsailor being lumped with fellow British strummers, like Travis, in the U.K. rock writers' declarative "future of music" tag.

"The journalists in England never really recovered from Britpop. So they put us together with other acoustic rock bands."

Rather than face the curse of failure after the blessing of hype, Starsailor, who entered the British charts in 2000 with vicious, aptly titled songs "Coming Down" and "Alcoholic," found its own niche in confrontational melancholy.

Theirs was an aggressive ardor of sadness and certainty, bathed in Crazy Horse-like clanging guitars and grainy acoustic ambience. Combine that mordant roar with a pungent vocal and lyrical mien courtesy of Walsh, a down-turned howler and caustic scribe in league with the primal screaming Tim Buckley. (No surprise there; the band took its name from a Buckley album.)

If you don't know all this, it's because Starsailor's gazillion-selling 2002 debut, Love Is Here, remained merely a guilty-pleasure secret for U.S. listeners. But fear not, colonists, the "future of music" -- now bigger, bouncier, happier and more anthemic -- arrives on these shores in the form of this year's shining model, Silence Is Easy (Capitol).

On their first album, Walsh allowed his troubles, and those of his underemployed bandmates, to seep into his lyrics. "Our sense of feeling like outcasts came out in our songs," says Walsh of the misery of getting dumped, being jobless and holding tight the frustration of singing quaintly in the choir while everyone else was a footballer. All the nagging headaches of childhood and teen unemployment are layered into the heated heartache of Love's sinister soundscape -- but exaggerated into an explosion of nattering naysaying emotion.

But listen harder to the co-dependent detritus and dire delirium in a song like "Fever" and you find an optimism at work, a lovelorn scorn that could grow cheery once successful. The glee in Silence Is Easy is intentional.

Instead of acting mopey or pleading poverty (like some who write of pennilessness while living high in the hills), Walsh and co. blossomed into their success, personally and aesthetically. "The feeling that we've gone from nowhere to somewhere, that I've gone from being alone to being married and having a baby, should inevitably make me happy," says Walsh. "That sounds naff and sappy, but it's all true."

It helps, too, that, rather than being the product of one man's mind -- a "figurehead and his art-school friends, forced to learn instruments" -- Starsailor is a unit that writes and acts as one. The organic-ism in their sound has been ingrained from the start.

That newly realized euphoria meant a bigger feel for Silence -- lyrics that raised all stakes, bluntly, on soul-stirring songs like an up-tempo "Music Was Saved," the chipper surprises of "Four to the Floor" and the syrupy sentiment of "Telling Them" with its maple-gooey music to match.

Big themes require big sound. To go with the notion of lyrical grandeur came, famously, the stringed arrangements and wall-of-sound semantics of none other than Phil Spector, the killer producer who named Starsailor his fave. Through his daughter, a record-plugger in the U.K., Spector passed along the message that "he preferred us to The Strokes, Radiohead and Coldplay. That was certainly an honor," recalls Walsh.

Spector's tracks on Silence Is Easy -- its title tune and "White Dove" -- were his last before being charged with murder. "We were surprised how laid-back he was. Nothing of the weird practices, at first, we'd heard about," says Walsh of the famed eccentric's violent temperament. "He was all about creating magic and good vibes rather than perfectionism."

In fact, it was Spector's shocking sense of sloppiness -- "a tendency to let bum notes, out-of-tune guitars and bad playing come through" -- that caused Starsailor to sever the relationship with him. "He wouldn't allow us to do anything again." Instead, Starsailor left the sonic gunplay to equally size-conscious producer John Leckie, of Radiohead fame. Leckie, in turn, continued making Silence noble, with a sizzling, psychedelic edge (as on "Shark Food") and a lively sensationalism at one with Starsailor's bold-faced freshness.

"We could have falsified emotions and continued our role as "suffering artists' as a lot of bands must do," jokes Walsh. "Instead, we risked being cheesy. Our aims were anthems. It must be listening to all that Springsteen, wanting unabashedly to connect with the man on the street rather than critics."

Starsailor plays Fri., Jan. 23, 9 p.m., $13.50-$15, with Johnathan Rice, The TLA, 334 South St., 215-922-1011.