Stars like fleas — Sun lights down on the fence
Stars like fleas is mainly a two man project. It was started by Shannon Fields, a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentist who remains the creative core of the band. The other very important person on this album is Montgomery Knott, a former Stars of the Lid collaborator. He wrote all the lyrics and sung them with a Michael Stipe-sounding voice, which can be a little annoying. Thankfully, it works on most tracks. And then, you have a rather large cast of guest musicians giving a helping hand: Daniel Carter (who worked with Matthew Shipp, William Parker and Yo la Tengo among countless others), Gerald Menke (ex-Mercury Rev), Molly Schnick (Out Hud), Matthew Heyner (No neck blues band) and countless other musicians, most of them coming from the jazz world.
It’s a bit like a wet dream come true: today’s most advanced electronica meets up with jazz, folk and timeless songwriting. The spirits of Robert Wyatt, Gastr del Sol and Talk Talk… Such is the beauty of this CD that it feels a bit trivial to speak about particular tracks rather than about the whole thing, the continuum that Sun lights down on the fence is. The main instruments are piano, acoustic guitar (occasionally banjo) and voices. To this central core is added, when needed, strings, horns, electronics, accordion… The list is as endless as the collaborator’s list. There might be as many musicians and instruments as in a big band, but it doesn’t harm the subtlety of it all the slightest bit. Orchestral manoeuvres in rural America backyards.
I’ve heard quite a few CD’s that could be part of a sort of small family: März, The Books, Hood… Now that I’ve heard (at long last) Stars like fleas’ debut, I can confidently say I found the manifesto of the “genre”. One of the best CD’s 2003, and I wasn’t even aware of it existence back then.