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Rating:
A flight, which with every beat of its wings rises, glorious and immense, that for every constellation crossed falls into the blackest abysses, brushing against death.
Tim Buckley's voice was this, and much more, Tim Buckley's voice could be anything, and this is the album that proves it. After the folk beginnings and the gradual evolution towards a new song-form, after jazz and heroin, after that immense void that is Lorca, a true point of no return, Tim Buckley burns everything he has produced and meticulously recomposes its ashes. And the result is Starsailor: acidic, free, at once pitch-black and luminous.
It is not exactly a cohesive album, each song stands alone, the tracks are enormous monuments rising between pauses of silence, never touching each other. There is the blues of "Come Here Woman", but it's a desperate blues sung by a man who is drowning, dragged below the surface of the deepest ocean by invisible tentacles. And then there is the light, the immense light of dawn, and the world awakens, barely touched by a trumpet and a guitar in perfect symbiosis in "I Woke Up". And the Chaos, Buckley's primordial screams, "Monterey", a track where the voice truly takes center stage, inhuman and disfigured, howling and bleeding, torn by a riff almost punk in its simplicity.
And then, Buckley of the beginnings returns. But "Moulin Rouge" is only a pause, necessary to recuperate before the leap into the void. "Song To The Siren": the sea, the open and boundless sea, and the last rays of the sun illuminate the rock, on which she sits. And adrift, a wreck of a thousand shipwrecks, Buckley raises his lament, but something in the distance screams, echoes of hope, echoes of death. And the fire that devastates all returns, in "Jungle Fire" finally the voice rises, free yet so claustrophobically closed in on itself, attempts to take flight, but it is burdened, it is wounded, almost falls. "Starsailor" is the point of arrival. From the abyss to the end of the universe, now pure spirit, the voice divides into its infinite parts, and is reflected in an endless play of refractions.
And then, Hell. "The Healing Festival" cannot be defined in any other way. Orgy of winds, percussion, and God knows what else, and that voice, that same voice we saw rise to the heavens, has now fallen back to Earth, purified and ready to abandon itself once more to earthly sins, now leads the dances of this pagan rite. And we have truly returned to the ground, Buckley has already achieved his goal, has already seen, touched, heard the infinite. And so he can afford a light closure with "Down By The Borderline", of course treated with the usual mastery, and above all with great trumpet solos.
Starsailor is the unattainable, and the way to get there, Starsailor is not a difficult or easy album, it is not rock, it is not jazz, it is not even music. It is a course charted at great cost by the navigator of the stars, to allow art to reach dizzying heights, to allow man to become equal to the Gods.
Tracklist Lyrics and Samples
03 Monterey (04:31)
Under a loop of stars in the vulgar cold
The dead airport lay
By the pebbles of the highway
Through the snail clouds
You soared to your lover
I hurried away my darling
With a howl in my throat.
Hiding inside the weeds
In the orange grove,
The black rooster crowed
Through the hollow of the midnight.
With my shot blood,
With stains on my fingers,
I run with the damned, my darling:
They have taught me to laugh.
04 Moulin Rouge (01:58)
"Comme la chanson est belle"
Chantez la Mademoiselle
Dansant dans le Moulin Rouge
"Love is a leap" she sighed
"Someday I'll be your bride,
When I leave the Moulin Rouge"
Je vais marier ma fille de danse
Et habiter en France
"Comme la chanson est belle"
Chantez la Mademoiselle
Dansant dans le Moulin Rouge
Dansant dans le Moulin Rouge
Dansant dans le Moulin Rouge
"Oh la la la" she sang
Spinning till midnight swang,
Dancing in the Moulin Rouge
I love her love I do,
All of her children too,
Oh I thank you, Moulin Rouge!
Je vais marier ma fille de danse
Et habiter en France
"Comme la chanson est belle"
Chantez la Mademoiselle
Dansant dans le Moulin Rouge
Dansant dans le Moulin Rouge
Dansant dans le Moulin Rouge
05 Song to the Siren (03:28)
Song To The Siren
( Larry Beckett )
Long afloat on shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
'Til your singing eyes and fingers
Drew me loving to your isle
And you sang
Sail to me
Sail to me
Let me enfold you
Here I am
Here I am
Waiting to hold you
Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you here when i was full sail
Now my foolish boat is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks,
For you sing, "Touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow:
O my heart, O my heart shies from the sorrow"
I am puzzled as the newborn child
I am troubled at the tide:
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Should I lie with Death my bride?
Hear me sing, "Swim to me, Swim to me, Let me enfold you:
Here I am, Here I am, Waiting to hold you"
06 Jungle Fire (04:39)
Somewhere old memories
Echoed from the street in a
Crying hole
Just a song from long ago
When I lost my easy gods to the Harlem insect laws
I heard your baited moans and the passing cars and the swirling
songs and the black man's bones
Through the walls and the stalls and the cackling calls
You were there
You were an island behind the sun
Yes an island
Where my love could live and life breathes
From deep inside
Deep deep deep deep inside
Mama Lie, I love you like a jungle fire
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Other reviews
By Enkriko
He played the impossible and soared, soared so high that he was not understood by most.
This album is, and always will be, an unclassifiable gem: a panegyric of diversified emotions where talking about songs is impossible and the only way to listen is to surrender.
By Blackdog
"Song To The Siren is the emblem of a unique interstellar journey, Tim’s voice a turbulent rise and fall of daring and impossible notes that tear your heart and hold it to you."
"Starsailor represented yet another attempt by Buckley to investigate the musical 'unknown', endowed with the suicidal talent for record companies that avoided him like the plague."
By filippobelar
It is equally challenging to find in the history of contemporary music a voice-instrument so overflowing and eclectic, capable of moving with great ease from baritone to falsetto.
The star navigator does with his voice what John Coltrane did with the saxophone and Jimi Hendrix with the guitar, and he does it consuming himself existentially.
