Stars Like Fleas
Odd Pieces Swimming Out Of Frozen Depths
Jan 3, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Telepathic Memory Toast Siren
original version appears on The Ken Burns Effect
We arrivedin Iowa very early, drivingback from Madison after missing our first scheduled session entirely due to the difficulty of breathing sometimes.This is the sound ofa large, cranky, sleepless group of peoplewho are like a colony ofcoral andneed each other so much it feels like a perforated disc.Our shows arelikeinsect colonies rather than collections of songs with breaks in between, something Tianna described as mad, undifferentiated cell growth (or something along those lines, more eloquently).Thesehere two fat pupae (or songs, if you prefer) are connected at the hip, knee, and waist, and arebased around what amountsto more or less two songs that will probably pop up on an epor lp we're recording now. One is nameless, the other is a mutation of the last60 seconds of apiece called "Toast Siren" fromthe ken burns effect.This is what we're doing right now...everything unvarnished and knotted and a little bit ugly and drooly, obsessively turning overa single, stupidly simple/banal structural idea for so long you either have to stop valuing the usual architecture and come in close or walk away. Naturally we see a lot of both. I remember feeling angry when we finished this. I don't know why. Now it makes me feel tender toward everyone who wasin the room that day.
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Karma's Hoax
original version appears on The Ken Burns Effect
aka "Karma's Hoax", from the Ken Burns Effect, which is the song we've been playing the longest as a live group.It is right that songs, or at least ours, should have different names everytime they are captured. Performing rights organizationsdo not agree. This has had as many names (my favorite alternate being "Mackie Melville") as it has forms and sets of lyrics (Montgomery improvises and constantly rewrites most of his lyrics, including after they are recorded in some form or another). Two days before this Jon had to leave the tour to honor some prior commitments with other bands and we lost all our horns and the 20 other instruments he was playing. We didn't work out alternate arrangements.Which opened up these awkward silences that I adore, and emboldened the group to both jump into them and let them hang. Tour was just about seeing what would happen every night with them, no two shows were remotely alike. A recipe for non-success and audience alienation maybe. But the alternate would feel a little too 'Broadway' to most of us, and maybe to the people who know us. We all seem to agree that we want to cultivate the human side of the thing, the side that feels embarrassed at parties and has ugly rashes and says the wrong thing at the wrong time.
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You Are My Memoir
original version appears on The Ken Burns Effect
"come, I'll get you off, I love basketball". Some of my favorite Montgomery lyrics are hidden in this song. I miss Matt Lavelle's tourettic bass clarinet stuff here but there's something maniacal and OCD about this version that I like. Oh, and Montgomery's vocals remind me of the odd Morrissey dry, falsetto out-of-tune yelps on the first Smiths album. Like ifthe Mozwas stuck on that setting, permanently...which, when I heard it for the first time, seemed like the most punk rock thing ever, in the least obvious way...like wearing your neutered-ness on your sleeve and embroidering it with dental floss...um...
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I Was Only Dancing
original version appears on The Ken Burns Effect
This could be about only dancing. I dance better than I think I do. This would sound good if it were adusty springfieldor fleet foxessong, but I'm also just asoftenhappy we're us. Right on! This song means something entirely different everytime we play it. It's like a ouija board with 9 sets of hands on it. things are bound to get nasty.
All of those people who use the start of a new year to shed clothes down to their skivvies to take a brief run into an ice cold lake are wired as Stars Like Fleas musical arrangements are, the way that they enter the bloodstream like plunges into beverages that are supposed to be kept cold at all costs, which only makes them fight and struggle twice as hard to get back to room temperatures. Those polar bears strip down to trunks and nothing else and feel that immediate surge of endorphins rage through their skin and bones when they touch the frigid waters for the first time, making the air temperature the equivalent to an oven's flame.
And that's half the entertainment, those dueling sensations at work - the recoil and the exhilaration, the desire for more, more, more or the need to free oneself from those uncomfortable elements and cover up with some wool blankets or whatever's available. These dueling sensations are the grounds for how Shannon Fields and Montgomery Knott, along with the multiple hoards of eclectic musicians that they surround themselves with on recordings and in live ensembles, bring their various visions into life. There's the extra indie value of highly technical experiments gone well to much of what this project - an infrequently touring outfit - is with most of its steps, extensively exploring what it means to move across many textures and buds. It's very much like that sizzling and freezing dynamic of those polar bear dippers in all of the band's pretty and fissured undertakings, the kicking and the bounding and the shocked moments of falling into something just as wild and unseen. It sometimes feels like how it must be out in that wide and frostily frozen lake on the other side of the bay windows here this afternoon. There are varying degrees of frozenness for that water and they're waters that, during the busy spring and summer months in this particular retreat town, are teeming with a multitude of fish. They're still out there and those fish at the bottom of this lake are busy getting cabin fever, making the kinds of commotion that the Stars Like Fleas music is based on.
It's all about contrasts and interestingly diverse avant garde riddlings that carry the hints of tiger skin rugs, lemon juice and skylights. These fish at the bottom of the lake are locked in there, just churning up the waters, waiting for the ceiling to back on up, to give them more sky, more stretching room, more maneuverability. As it is, they're crunched in, forced to get to know their lake-land neighbors better. They share their decreased heart rates together. They can't get away from their own stenches and it drives them slowly into madness. They develop nervous tics like fin-biting and smoking, drinking heavily and carousing with women and men that they've just met. Before long all of it takes too much of a toll and the thrashing around begins, the restlessness takes completely over and there's no telling what could happen in the volatile conditions. Amazingly, what usually does is some kind of conflict resolution that works itself out and the thaw comes just in time to meet it. The fish and the music of Stars Like Fleas come out on the other side smelling like some abstract roses.
Stars Like Fleas MySpace
Hometapes Records
