One of my favorite LA-based bands just keeps on getting better. It’s hard to sound so lush, spare, and desperate at the same time—to be transfixed with the fungus and peeling lead paint of everyday living while still staring up into the atmosphere, hoping there’s something sublime, maybe even conciliatory, in all of the madness. Or maybe it’s just madness. For lack of a better lexicon, the Starvations are roots music how I imagine it to be, not how it usually is—full of purple, hokey Americana aching to be a toothpaste commercial. The Starvations playing seems to come from hearts as fiery as the first swigs of uncapped whiskey, yet as broken as bottom shelf liquor bottles at the end of a rough night. I imagine the band akin to an impossibly well-stocked jukebox that plays only the dead-on, heart to ear to wet eyes tracks. With these two tracks, there’s an accordion front and center, and it’s the furthest thing from a Pogues rip or faux jig. It helps congeal the sound, like the pumping of another organic instrument, as natural as sadness and remorse or the melancholy that comes from fleetly remembering, then forgetting, a good time. The real deal.
–todd (GSL)