It's hard enough keeping up with the deluge of new bands and releases each week. But nestled in with the new releases in the prominent register-side display case at my local record store are such "new" releases as Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville, Beck's Odelay, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Street Survivors, and Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue. When nothing old stays that way and old becomes new again, how in the world can anyone be expected to keep up with what's never been released before, overshadowed as it is by the constant stream of albums getting released again?
Starling Electric's Clouded Staircase was first released just a couple of years ago, in 2006, so even factoring in the Ann Arbor band's relative obscurity, a 2008 relaunch seems a little, well, premature. Adding redundancy to redundancy, Clouded Staircase is power-pop through and through, which makes it an intrinsic mish-mash of much that has come before it. Beach Boys. Byrds. Beatles. Big Star. Even a few bands that don't begin with "B." The group's website boasts that "we specialize in everything truly great about pop music from 1965 to 1977." That's smug enough to instantly turn plenty of people off, but power-pop deserves a certain degree of leeway. It's a genre that exists within its own carefully circumscribed bounds. Too much deviation means it's no longer what it set out to be.
Clouded Staircase turns out to be is an impressive enough achievement, at least taken on its own terms. Recorded at home, mostly by bandleader Caleb Dillon but fleshed out with a little help from his friends, it hits all the right notes-- the harmonies, the chiming guitars, the baroque arrangements, the slightly psychedelic twists and turns. The question is whether the disc adds up to more than just the sum of its Frankenstein monster parts, but it's hard to muster up much excitement for an album where "been there, done that" is the stated and all-too-achievable goal.
Starling Electric has audaciously declared the disc "a call to arms for anyone still interested in melodies, harmonies, and the power of good pop song," which is a little strident, even as far as calls to arm go. Sure, "The St. Valentines Day Massacre", "Camp-Fire", "New Era", "All Through the Fall", and "To Flunker, With Love" are solid, as is the multi-part suite that is the title track, its pieces united by gently played piano. But an album that is almost by definition little more than stitched-together homage and affectations can only get you so far. In fact, from start to finish, all 18 songs are of such a piece with one another, so carefully do they adhere to the rigid rules of retro, that Clouded Staircase itself comes across as one long suite (albeit thankfully at an LP-friendly 51 minutes length).
On one hand, that's a testament to the disc's cohesion. On the other, the approach is somewhat limiting, and occasionally even stifling. Dillon is a talented young guy (he supposedly started work on the album while still in high school), and the kudos he's already earned from peers such as the Posies and Robert Pollard are commendable. But as much as Dillon may aspire to the glory days of 1965 to 1977, that creative path is self-defeating. Those golden years of power-pop are long gone, and until he finds a way to put his own stamp on what's come before, he's unlikely to escape the fate that's befallen so many of the other ambitious but anonymous copycat acts that have likewise come after, stars in their eyes but other people's ideas in their minds.
