by B. J. Carter
Coastal Journal staff
When you take the “L” train to Williamsburg from Union Square, it’s a good idea to have the trip rigorously sound-tracked. My persistence in denying myself an iPod means that I still carry those silly CDs and even sillier CD players with me. The chances that I would bother to unload one CD in exchange for another on the way to Brooklyn were always minimal, so I had to make the high-pressure decision of which album I’d be taking with me.
I was taking drum lessons from an Irish fellow by the name of Dave Mason. He was in his late-twenties, soft-spoken, extremely patient. Once we established that I had “rhythm,” we promptly moved from rock percussion to jazz percussion, his specialty and my curiosity. We would meet on the steps of a warehouse on Bedford Avenue every Sunday at around 4 p.m.; I would help him move some equipment into a rehearsal space he and his band were using, he would give me an hour lesson.
It was this time of year, so sunlight would already be fading when I would arrive in Williamsburg at four, and it was dark by five. I had to walk ten blocks or so back to the L and then wait 15 minutes to board. Sunday afternoons were long affairs.
There were five records that enjoyed heavy circulation during my stay in New York, including the Walkmen’s Bows and Arrows and Jesse Malin’s The Heat. But the Church’s Starfish was always the weapon of choice on Sundays.
I had never even heard of the Church until I caught Starfish on WCLZ’s “CD at noon” that summer. I thought it was some long lost Echo & the Bunnymen record, but I didn’t recognize any of the songs, and it wasn’t . . . melodramatic enough. The mood was subdued, the vocals baritone and breathy, and the guitars spindly arpeggio. In retrospect, Coldplay’s X + Y most heavily resembles this album. And of course, “Under the Milky Way” appears in Donnie Darko alongside the aforementioned Bunnymen’s “Killing Moon.”
It largely translates to a cold, desolate-sounding record in the tradition of the best shoe-gazing new wave records, but the delicacy of the execution distinguishes it from other like-minded records by the likes of the Cure or Ride. “Lost” and “Antenna” are both songs that rival “Under the Milky Way” in beauty and mystery.
The Church sound like they’re playing at the base of the world’s largest glacier on Starfish, and as it appeared to me on the L train heading back to the city, that glacier might as well have been Manhattan. Starfish by no means sounds like an urban record, so its superimposition over urban landscape was revealing. It was like holding up a mirror to Manhattan’s “Gotham” personality, the brooding side of the city. The strange part was that I found it comforting.
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