Talitres, 2007

Like the film making process from which it derives its title, Stars Like Fleas latest album is a pointillistic pan and zoom expression of memory and experience not only in content, but also in technique. The sonic and emotional dynamic range of The Ken Burns Effect is nothing short of astonishing. Moments of hushed meditative intensity erupt into howling storms of futility, flailing resplendently into the all-erasing void. Chances are you will not appreciate this album fully until about the fifth time through and it may take twice as long before you actually enjoy it, but if you have the patience for this particular strain of alchemy, the experiment will eventually sink in repaying you exponentially for the effort of attention it requires.

The opening piece, “Hoax Head” introduces the album to a chorus of random studio chatter and instrumental warm-ups like “What’s Going On” being transmitted from an alternate reality. You get an idea of what you are in for as strings moan, woodwinds sigh and percussion clatters aimlessly about before the sounds come to their senses in the great swelling strains of “Karma’s Hoax”. A voice as odd as it is beautiful, all edge and elegy sets the tone, the only element that even remotely resembles anything related to popular music. What happens around it is unfathomable: a complex fusion of free-jazz, orchestral chamber music, and post-rock that improbably retains an otherworldly transparency and lightness. Even when it all falls apart at the 2:30 mark, there remains an aura of clarity within the white-noise maelstrom. The long droning fade-out is like the final whimper that inevitably follows that which is born with a bang. In contrast “I Was Only Dancing” is nearly conventional with its gorgeous pedal steel guitar and gently throbbing double bass framing a melody that a band this experimental has no right being able to concoct. “Falstaff” is so diffuse that it is almost left entirely up to the listener whether they wish to adhere the separate elements together into something recognizable or to just float away in its out-of-body spaciousness. “Early Riser” is an attempt to make musical instruments sound like household objects and perhaps offers a window into the once proposed Pink Floyd album where every sound would be generated by such random bric-a-brac. “Berbers in Tennis Shoes” gets back to relative accessibility by way of strummed banjo and vocalist Montgomery Knott’s plaintive obsession with cursed romances such as those that he ruminated almost exclusively upon in 2003’s stunning Sun Lights Down on the Fence. But whereas that album relied heavily on the shock of jarring collocation, here the band works it hyper-synthesis of disparate sounds and styles into a more flowing organic whole. “Toast Siren” withdraws back into the folds of abstraction though this time remaining anchored to a pulsating rhythm. By the time the vocals enter the mix the song becomes an anthem for the disenchanted, the repeated chant of “it’s treason” resounding from beneath the floorboards. This anthemic quality is carried over into “See for the Woods” a lament for the error of misconception. Rolling drum patterns launch the chorus of “always, always” into a doomed loop of eternal recurrence. The lovely optimism of “You Are My Memoir” should sound awkward in relation but once again Shannon Fields and company manage to not only make it work but to also imbue it with profound conviction. The final track “Some Nettles” is the magnum opus that brings all of these strangely affecting pieces together into a unified whole, serving to encapsulate all that has gone before and to advance it to the point of exhaustion. Mahlerian in scope and sound, the track attempts to encompass “the whole world” into its 13:41 and comes frighteningly close to succeeding.

The Ken Burns Effect is “The Glass Bead Game” of music. Like Hermann Hesse’s masterpiece it envisions a complete synthesis of knowledge, an embrace of the entire realm of experience. From Debussy’s impressionistic water-coloring, to Mahler’s aforementioned majestic sweep, to Coltrane’s restless quest for truth in sound, to Talk Talk’s graceful ascension into boundless dimensions, Stars Like Fleas absorb all of these influences and take them into new places. Places where if we dare to follow, thanks to artists such as them, there will be sufficient light by which to travel.