Built on beautiful guitar melodies stepping off chords that ascend hopefully but fall into mournful places glued together by pulsating drones of sound that feel like fading yet persistent memories, organ tones that feel like a dark reverential gospel, heavy bass and elegant drum anchors that uplift like friends carrying you away from a fight and a plaintive pained vocal countenance that is supple despite the scars. AND born, born from a parent's decades long addiction and particularly one Christmas when a fight around that drug use ended a son and father relationship for nearly ten years. In a nutshell, that is the sonic atmospheres of "No Show" by STARRY EYES from the outfit's EP "Ciao Bella".
From any view, from any position, the track is stunning in it's melancholy beauty and elevated by the Official Video starring Olivia Pires and a house that erupts. A diorama of utter breakdown and emotional destruction, metaphors galore that are apparent enough to make your stomach churn.
There is a lot to unpack and as someone who writes about music, about individual songs for the most part, some stories are best not repackaged but just opened up and absorbed. This is one of those times, one of the best times, to use press notey stuff because I feel it is what those most closely involved to this personal stuff, the tragedy of their lives has fully approved for public consumption. It is not something I am always comfortable doing but in terms of the seeds of the elegant bloodletting of "No Show" I must.
From Press notes:
The story of California grunge-pop band STARRY EYES is both tragic and triumphant. The band evolved from the deep friendship between founding duo guitarist John Shippey and drummer Matthew Scoggins. The pair worked together tirelessly for two years on the music for its uplifting debut EP, Ciao Bella, while on an arduous quest to find the right singer to complement their unique sound. John and Matt eventually struck gold in early 2021 with singer and lyricist Kyle Tekiela, and for three weeks it looked like the LA-based group was complete. Then Matt died suddenly of drug-related causes, and the band’s ambitions came to a tragic halt. Today, nearly two years after Matt’s death, John and Kyle have soldiered on and the band’s story is a powerful rebirth narrative.
“As the title of the EP suggests, Ciao Bella is a somber goodbye to the beautiful things in our lives that have passed, and a jubilant hello to the beautiful things to come,” Kyle says. John adds: “These songs are for people who’ve been through some shit — music is our catharsis. Many of the songs on Ciao Bella wrestle with the issues of addiction and loss, but we always try to balance the negative with the positive and keep looking toward the future."
John and Matt met in 2018 while working as touring personnel with Incubus, and had immediate personal and musical connections. John has been Chris Kilmore’s DJ/Keyboard Tech since 2017, and Matt joined the Incubus crew in 2018 as monitor engineer. They formed the band while on the road and over the course of several years wrote and recorded 12 instrumentals. It wasn’t until Kyle joined the band that the vocals were written and recorded.
STARRY EYES are spiritually aligned with the dark catharsis inherent in the 1990’s Seattle scene. Many of its lyrical themes address the anguish and pain of watching loved ones burn down their lives with substance abuse and other self-destructive behaviors. Kyle’s father has been a heroin addict for decades, and the reverberations of his actions still create difficulties for him and his family today. These themes only became amplified by Matt’s sudden death. However, unlike the furrowed brow angst of grunge, STARRY EYES songs waft a California balminess with grimy low-slung riffs and searing guitar leads being offset by dreamy chiming passages and sharp pop-rock hooks. John describes his guitar approach as “salty air rock” and his riffs exude a sweet melancholy. Kyle adds to the band’s alt-rock ambitions a passion for Radiohead, and punk/emo influences from the aughts. As a vocalist, his range is powerfully dynamic, spanning seductive gravelly low-tones and reaching skyward to a honeyed falsetto.
Ciao Bella is self-produced and exudes a warm and crisp fidelity due to being tracked on 2-inch tape and mixed on analog boards by legendary producer and Sub Pop Records hitmaker Phil Ek (Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes, Modest Mouse, The Shins, Built to Spill, and Mudhoney). Multi Grammy-award winning engineer Greg Calbi (Adele, Ramones, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen) mastered the EP. The vinyl release of the EP will feature sensual cover art hand painted by John Shippey’s longtime girlfriend, the artist Natalia Zofia.
The EP opens anthemically with "Jetlag,” a song bursting with ringing power chords, grungy riffs, and sing-a-long hooks. Lurking beneath the song’s sunny disposition is satirical social commentary on every kid’s Hollywood dreams. The message is be careful of what you wish for. Here, Kyle sings of his own disillusionment with the glitzy but hollow-feeling success in the LA film industry. His lines smolder, and one standout passage is: I wanna die in California/I want a desert funeral/blow my ashes off a mirror, with a hundred dollar bill. The immersive song “Trip” showcases the band’s subtle mastery of dynamics, easing from jangly guitar passages, to shout-from-the-mountain-tops emotionality, and then to a groovy blues-inflected bridge section. The stately “No Show” features dreamy vocals about a nightmarish and unforgettable Christmas when a huge fight around Kyle’s father’s drug abuse ended their relationship for nearly a decade.
The haunting but hooky “Crush” explores Kyle’s punk and emo influences and boasts an arrangement that is compact but also ambitious and transporting. This is the first song Kyle wrote in STARRY EYES, and through a powerful lost-at-sea metaphorical writing, explores his experience attempting to put his father through rehab. Little did Kyle know when he wrote the lyrics and presented them to the band that Matt was also struggling with his own addiction. The song marked a powerful moment for Kyle’s integration into the band. “’Crush’ and ‘No Show’ are explicit in their exploration of the worst kind of drug abuses. I remember Matt hearing the songs for the first time and being very quiet.” Kyle says. “After his death a few weeks later, it really hit home that there are so many people out there who can intimately relate to these experiences. I hope that by opening up and talking about them, we can find some way to heal.”
“As the title of the EP suggests, Ciao Bella is a somber goodbye to the beautiful things in our lives that have passed, and a jubilant hello to the beautiful things to come,” Kyle says. John adds: “These songs are for people who’ve been through some shit — music is our catharsis. Many of the songs on Ciao Bella wrestle with the issues of addiction and loss, but we always try to balance the negative with the positive and keep looking toward the future."
John and Matt met in 2018 while working as touring personnel with Incubus, and had immediate personal and musical connections. John has been Chris Kilmore’s DJ/Keyboard Tech since 2017, and Matt joined the Incubus crew in 2018 as monitor engineer. They formed the band while on the road and over the course of several years wrote and recorded 12 instrumentals. It wasn’t until Kyle joined the band that the vocals were written and recorded.
STARRY EYES are spiritually aligned with the dark catharsis inherent in the 1990’s Seattle scene. Many of its lyrical themes address the anguish and pain of watching loved ones burn down their lives with substance abuse and other self-destructive behaviors. Kyle’s father has been a heroin addict for decades, and the reverberations of his actions still create difficulties for him and his family today. These themes only became amplified by Matt’s sudden death. However, unlike the furrowed brow angst of grunge, STARRY EYES songs waft a California balminess with grimy low-slung riffs and searing guitar leads being offset by dreamy chiming passages and sharp pop-rock hooks. John describes his guitar approach as “salty air rock” and his riffs exude a sweet melancholy. Kyle adds to the band’s alt-rock ambitions a passion for Radiohead, and punk/emo influences from the aughts. As a vocalist, his range is powerfully dynamic, spanning seductive gravelly low-tones and reaching skyward to a honeyed falsetto.
Ciao Bella is self-produced and exudes a warm and crisp fidelity due to being tracked on 2-inch tape and mixed on analog boards by legendary producer and Sub Pop Records hitmaker Phil Ek (Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes, Modest Mouse, The Shins, Built to Spill, and Mudhoney). Multi Grammy-award winning engineer Greg Calbi (Adele, Ramones, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen) mastered the EP. The vinyl release of the EP will feature sensual cover art hand painted by John Shippey’s longtime girlfriend, the artist Natalia Zofia.
The EP opens anthemically with "Jetlag,” a song bursting with ringing power chords, grungy riffs, and sing-a-long hooks. Lurking beneath the song’s sunny disposition is satirical social commentary on every kid’s Hollywood dreams. The message is be careful of what you wish for. Here, Kyle sings of his own disillusionment with the glitzy but hollow-feeling success in the LA film industry. His lines smolder, and one standout passage is: I wanna die in California/I want a desert funeral/blow my ashes off a mirror, with a hundred dollar bill. The immersive song “Trip” showcases the band’s subtle mastery of dynamics, easing from jangly guitar passages, to shout-from-the-mountain-tops emotionality, and then to a groovy blues-inflected bridge section. The stately “No Show” features dreamy vocals about a nightmarish and unforgettable Christmas when a huge fight around Kyle’s father’s drug abuse ended their relationship for nearly a decade.
The haunting but hooky “Crush” explores Kyle’s punk and emo influences and boasts an arrangement that is compact but also ambitious and transporting. This is the first song Kyle wrote in STARRY EYES, and through a powerful lost-at-sea metaphorical writing, explores his experience attempting to put his father through rehab. Little did Kyle know when he wrote the lyrics and presented them to the band that Matt was also struggling with his own addiction. The song marked a powerful moment for Kyle’s integration into the band. “’Crush’ and ‘No Show’ are explicit in their exploration of the worst kind of drug abuses. I remember Matt hearing the songs for the first time and being very quiet.” Kyle says. “After his death a few weeks later, it really hit home that there are so many people out there who can intimately relate to these experiences. I hope that by opening up and talking about them, we can find some way to heal.”
All art can be transformative but I think that songs can shape you in multi-layered ways. On one very real level they are sonic Rorschach tests, sonic inkblots that are interpreted by all who listen in slightly different ways because we take the artist's music and lyrics and imprint our own experiences onto them. The more direct the song is, maybe the more we can relate or maybe the less we can relate. The more vague maybe offers more interpretations.
On a secondary level a song offers only a glimpse and when more subtext it offered through learning about the backstory, the more understanding, empathy (and sometimes even derision) transpires from listener to the author. The deeper the back story, everything either way is heightened. Depth of field, so to speak, in terms of context and artistic concept, in terms of transmission and absorption (emotionally speaking) is a wonderful thing.
"No Show" as a glimpse is stunning enough but along with it's story, with what makes it tick and cry and stare at the midnight sky all alone, it is transformative.
-Robb Donker Curtius
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://www.instagram.com/wearestarryeyes/
https://www.wearestarryeyes.com/
The story of California grunge-pop band, STARRY EYES, is both tragic and triumphant. The band evolved from the friendship between founding duo: guitarist John Shippey and drummer Matthew Scoggins. The pair worked for two years on the music for their debut EP, Ciao Bella, while on a frustrating search to find the right singer to complement their unique sound. John and Matt eventually struck gold in early 2021 with singer and lyricist Kyle Tekiela, and for three weeks it looked like the LA-based group was complete. Then, Matt died suddenly of drug-related causes, and the band’s ambitions came to a tragic halt. Today, nearly two years after Matt's death, John and Kyle have soldiered on and the band’s story is a powerful rebirth narrative.
STARRY EYES, alt rock, indie rock, dream pop, shoegaze, storytelling, catharsis, bloodletting, emotional music, "No Show" (Official Video), debut EP "Ciao Bella",
No comments:
Post a Comment