Starring

By Nate Dorr » Prog Rock is ok.

Starring coalesced last fall out of a bunch of old friends from Oberlin who had since been hanging around New York City and stirring various ripples and waves in various, wildly (different) projects. Keyboardist and accordionist Mike Gallope first pulled Pterodactyl drummer Matt Marlin into some experimental jam sessions where the early foundations were laid, Amy Cimini (viola) and Sam Kulik (bass) soon followed, and Clara Latham (guitar, vocals) finally joined to boldly lead the group into territory where none of their prior work (new music chamber ensemble, jazz, punk, noise, free-improv) had dared tread. Yes, they were becoming a Prog Rock band. And somehow making that a good thing.

I caught them a week ago, and the parts were already snapping together with surprising ease. The band (minus Kulik, off touring with Capillary Action) played with a vigorous clarity, a compositional vision and instrumental facility that no amount of psych haze, guitar fuzz, or jam flirtations could obscure. And even with the extended compositions, they held momentum and never spiraled off into the kind of excesses that are rightly associated with prog. The stand-out and definitive statement of purpose may have been "Body Double", which, even at eight minutes (or more?) has a crisp and compelling structural integrity that pulled the audience right through. Here it is, newly mixed down just last week:

Starring, "Body Double"

Gallope explains:

So here’s the idea: a frenetic, really fast math/prog setup all focused around stretching song structures to the limit – this song Body Double is a perfect example. We wanted the skeleton of a totally standard rock song (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus) – but we wanted it utterly oversized, and without any silly storytelling (or vocals for that matter) in the verses. So the verse is just a punishing hippie jam (haha). Clara wanted something totally out of nowhere for the chorus, so she wrote a few creepy lyrics (“Oh my gold, Oh we know…”) over some open chords. When this ends the song goes back in the verse even bigger, followed by another chorus, and then, of course, a bridge with some love song lyrics (“Won’t you be my body double?”). At the end we try to finish huge. This happens again in Sonnenbrille (another song of competing heft and length), but with a totally different structure – a big ABCBA form.

Now, for the record we’re working on (with Jeremy Scott at the Civil Defense, where Matt recorded "Worldwild"), Clara and I are throwing in some chill-out interludes (w/ukuleles!) around these jams, and I'm even adding some harpsichord and rickety piano parts to take things out a little further. After all, this isn’t a punk band, it’s prog (I guess?), and we have no real business keeping it so intense all the time. We’re trying to keep it nerdy.

When we play live, we lengthen things out. Our first shows were a little scrappy, but I think we’re starting to tighten things up a bit live. A few changes have come into place—I switched over to a Farfisa (way more magical an instrument than my old Roland synth) and we’re putting some video projections on top with the help of our brilliant friend Neil Chamberlain (who just finished a great Pterodactyl video for their new record). I think Starring uniforms are on the way, too.

Posted on May 05, 2009. More on: starring, pterodactyl, prog