Starflyer 59 -- Leave Here a Stranger

10/10

One night in college I hung out with my friends in a parking lot til 2 a.m. I'd been really stressed out, and needed to blow off some steam, and this time with friends had done the trick. The moon high in the sky, bugs buzzing around the streetlamps, I got into my car, leaned the seat back, and turned the keys. The first notes of Leave Here a Stranger drifted in from nowhere as I sunk through the seat and into a warm bath of noise.
Hey, at one point, with some headphones on, I actually took a literal bath while listening to Leave Here a Stranger, and the experience was even better.
Starflyer 59's Leave Here a Stranger is a singular album, a work of artistic genius that should have received all of the accolades Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was rather thoughtlessly and breathlessly handed around the same time period. Strangely enough, removed from the Indierati slathering it with endless praise seemingly before they even heard it, much as they did for Animal Collective's 2009 flaming ear excrement of the year, Merriweather Post Pavilion, you don't really see much dedication to that Wilco album any more. If any of those early 00's indie bandwagon folks had turned their attention toward Starflyer 59's Leave Here a Stranger, they may have had their life changed. Leave Here a Stranger actually lives up to the accolades those critics gave Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And unlike what those now late-30's and 40's once indie-kids did back then with Wilco's work, you don't have to force yourself to like Leave Here a Stranger.
One person who wrote for the Los Angeles Times actually got this 18 years ago, and put Leave Here a Stranger in his year-ending 2001 top-ten list, but the link to that is dead now.
But all that is neither here-nor-there. Not enough people have heard Leave Here a Stranger, but I have, and it is one of my favorite albums of all time.
Yes, good for me, one of my favorite albums is an obscure Tooth & Nail release maybe 20,000 people have heard. Aren't I cool. Since I've already gone off on essentially three pointless tangents (I listened to Leave Here a Stranger after hanging out late with friends in a parking lot once, I listened to Leave Here a Stranger in the bathtub once, and Leave Here a Stranger is way better than Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), here's another one that at least hopefully describes how Starflyer 59's Leave Here a Stranger sounds.
I've written on The Nicsperiment multiple times about arriving at the tail end of Generation X, and immediately feeling alienated as those Millennials (I love you, Millennials, don't worry, this isn't a hit piece on you) seemed to arrive standing right at my heels. My years of college coincided with all the other Gen X'ers graduating, along with many campus structures from the 60's and 70's getting demolished. The KLSU studio even went digital, and we threw out the bulky thing that played all of our commercial spot tapes. Yes, I used to record advertisements, which weren't called advertisements because college radio is non-profit, to tape. I still have some of them in a box in my attic, where they are surely degrading in the Louisiana heat. I should probably get those into some climate-controlled storage.
Anyway, there's this vibe I have from college, especially late '01 (when I was no longer in the younger group of college students), to probably late '03 (one of several senior semesters), of some strange cornucopia of lost places and textures, musky building interiors, old Persian rugs, aging technology growing dusty in the corner, old outdated, color-faded scientific charts and save-the-environment/peace-and-love posters on the walls over old yellowed-brick, lots of glass, colors, 70's fantasy book covers, hearing about some local band who was big in the 90's, but now all the members are in their late 20's and having kids and hanging it up, and they're having their last show at my favorite dive bar, and I'm too young to have seen them in their prime, and all the Millennials coming after me are too young to see them at this show. Yes, barely born a decade after the Beatles broke up, and clinging to Gen X, but possibly belonging to no generation, and barely existing in the space in between, when the old one is heading out the door, the hangers on reminiscing about how I missed it, while I can here the new group knocking on the door outside while the room's being cleaned out.
Starflyer 59's Leave Here a Stranger calls back to late 60's psychedelia, leaning heavily on guitar effects, while also echoing hard in a sort of chamber pop style that should be at odds with the latter, but instead fuses with it for 40-minutes of aural perfection. The album beings with the sound of tape running and either a treated acoustic guitar or piano testing out some chords before the electric guitar, that reverbed, eternal electric guitar comes in to sunset a note, all over a soft, comforting bed of white noise. Then an ancient organ chimes, anticipation builds, a brief pause, and the full band comes in, keyboard chorus-tone included. It's tough to communicate how warm and enveloping all this sound, recorded in glorious mono, truly is. Martin employed the experienced Terry Scott Taylor to produce Leave Here a Stranger, and the elder statesman brings a wall-of-noise, late-60's "throw in the kitchen-sink" style to the album. This approach grabs the often melancholy hand of Martin's previous stylings and lifts his work to a transcendent level that it's always reached for, but never quite grasped. These ten tracks flow together so brilliantly, possessing a subtle undercurrent of emotion, growing more powerful with each listen.
Leave Here a Stranger also marks the moment Martin's voice truly becomes an asset, as he adopts a weary rasp, his voice strangely able to communicate a certain sense of tired hope that day-to-day generally renders intangible.
Martin, who has unfortunately never occupied more than a small niche of musical popularity, has offered the world a great gift with this album. Leave Here a Stranger is something upon which I can hang so many feelings, senses, and memories. I hope it doesn't end up like all of those forgotten rooms, buildings, and bands whose names I can no longer remember in the world's collective consciousness. It deserves a place of honor in its eternal memory...way more than that Wilco crap.
How far til W?


2001 Tooth & Nail Records
1. All My Friends Who Play Guitar 5:21
2. Can You Play Drums? 2:56
3. When I Learn to Sing 3:25
4. Give Up the War 4:49
5. Things Like This Help Me 4:58
6. This I Don't Need 2:53
7. I Like Your Photographs 6:21
8. ...Moves On 1:20
9. Night Music 3:41
10. Your Company 4:21