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Rating:
Jazz, folk or expressionism form?
It is a daunting task to label the art of Tim Buckley, yet 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.
"Starsailor" is the culmination of an adventurous search begun five years prior, a tortuous path ending with the magic of "Song to the Siren."
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, pushing towards a hypothetical "beyond" that would lead him, at only twenty-eight years old, to a dramatic death.
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 Alecasti
Tim Buckley burns everything he has produced and meticulously recomposes its ashes.
Starsailor 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.
