“I don't really expect anybody to listen to the music, to be perfectly honest,” Stars of the Lid’s Brian McBride once admitted, neatly summing up how he and bandmate Adam Wiltzie view their long-simmering, late-era success. Over the past 20-plus years, they have gone from Austin weirdos exploring the ether of college radio (McBride’s slot was wincingly called “The Dick Fudge Show”) to intrepid four-track space explorers to drone transcendentalists. In the decade since Stars of the Lid’s last full-length, 2007’s And Their Refinement of the Decline, their distilled sensibilities can be heard echoing through minimalists from Max Richter and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson to Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds. Though perhaps McBride’s statement is more reflective of the group’s most faithful audience, those just trying to fall asleep.
For all of its wide-open plains and famous “stars at night,” Texas wasn’t much known for inspiring ambient music in the early ’90s, and the duo’s earlier albums bear a rougher hew. They may have been aiming for the celestial spaces of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ Apollo, but recording to four-track in a rickety house in East Austin imparted something coarser and earthier. Found voices, thunked noises, and tape hiss inform their 1995 debut, Music for Nitrous Oxide, while e-bowed guitars and back-masked effects run throughout their 1996 follow-up, Gravitational Pull vs. The Desire for an Aquatic Life. Originally presented in a noisy and problematic pressing on white vinyl, the album finally gets a deserved vinyl reissue, 22 years on. It reveals less a dream music than one informed, as Wiltzie has recalled, by “blistering heat and massive drugs and depression.”
Looking anew at the cover art depicting a blurry view through a screen door, you can almost feel the oppressive, gelatinous humidity of summer in Texas. A sense of lethargy permeates Gravitational, something that the albums the duo recorded after leaving Austin (McBride for Chicago and Los Angeles and Wiltzie for Brussels) elegantly float above. The 19-minute expanse of “Cantus; In Memory of Warren Wiltzie” feels dark and submerged, full of seismic rumbles, storm-drain echoes, and scraped guitar strings. While the billowing drones of later Stars recordings make the listener feel weightless, “Cantus” instead casts a disorienting haze around you, never quite letting you escape.
The second side of the album is where Stars of the Lid hit their stride, tapping into the sort of hypnagogic sound that would come to be their modus operandi for the next two decades on albums like The Ballasted Orchestra and The Tired Sounds of.... Distant drones, sampled strings, e-bowed guitar swells, and sine waves that sound like alien transmissions are blended together to sublime effect on “Lactate’s Moment.” The elements rise and fall so naturally, they come to feel like part of your own breathing. The strings that emerge toward the end lead seamlessly into the elegiac closer “Be Little With Me.” As glib and peculiar as the duo’s titles can be (see “December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface”), the melody of “Be Little With Me” feels vulnerable, sincere, and heart-rending. It’s the sound of the band learning how to be wordlessly evocative, going beyond paralyzing feelings of depression and the urge to self-medicate to get at an emotionally resonant core.
