LAUGHING OUTLAW RECORDS & MANAGEMENT


		MIRROR, SIGNAL, MANOEUVRE Starky RRP: ~~$19.95 AUD~~ Now: $10.00 AUD Customers outside Australia don't pay GST

JJJ Feature Album – October 2003 !!!

First single Saturday Night, Sunday Morning high rotation on Triple J !!!

Drunken journalists, stuck in a rut day-jobbers, council estate big mouths and life-serving gaolbirds. School ties, hand-knitted rainbow ponchos and fingerless gloves. Subject matter for the average Starky song is anything but ordinary but then this, their debut album, is no ordinary record.

The album opens with Get Up, its Wilson-esque melody and thumping bass line crashing into a chorus bound to make any ear prick up. There’s barely time for breath before first radio single Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, with its twin riffing guitars and sing along chorus is out of the blocks. “All the working week we wait for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.”

Cool It, with its gobbing old man lyric has the best guitar riff that Cobain never wrote and says all it has to in just over two minutes. Then there’s Girl Talk, a track brimming with an almost Clash-like intensity, a perfect example of the band at it’s best, urgent guitars, hook in the brain melody, an almost off the rails rhythm section. The song boiled down to its most basic elements and all over in less than two and a half minutes.

That’s How I’ll Know You is ‘sharp as a pin and infectious as all fuck’ (I94 Bar Website), the efforts of a band ready to explode, captured the old way on a two inch tape in a single live take. Tabards is one of only a couple of reflective moments on the record. The song explores school days, a subject that seems to be a recurring motif throughout the album, before a final key change and release.

After this mellower moment, the album reenergizes with a tribute to hip hop pioneer Jam Master Jay. Breakdance Glove’s cheerleader, call and response chorus will have a thousand fingerless gloved hands wavin’ in the air like they just don’t care. What album would be complete without addressing the young man’s blues? Love and loss is the central theme of Complicator. With its Pet Sounds drum intro and counter point guitars, it’s probably the most introspective moment of the album.

Theme From High School is a call to arms. The classroom is a battlefield, a fight that often continues into life after school as the protagonist says “I’m drawing moustaches and bi-focal glasses on pictures of teachers from old high school classes.”

“Let’s run our careers onto the rocks tonight”. City Prison Doors is a track so full of life that it feels like the band could literally be playing in your lounge room. The album finishes with the swinging Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, a song that in comparison with others on the record, seems like a sprawling epic but still comes in at just over three and half minutes.

‘Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre’ is Starky’s debut album and was produced by Australian punk rock legend and Radio Birdman Rob Younger and co-produced, engineered and mixed by Wayne Connolly (You Am I, silverchair, The Vines). It was recorded in just nine days and captures the excitement and energy that is synonymous with the band’s live performances.

Track listing (focus tracks †):

1. Get Up †

2. Saturday Night, Sunday Morning †

3. Cool It

4. Girl Talk †

5. That’s How I’ll Know You †

6. Tabards

7. Breakdance Glove †

8. Complicator †

9. Theme From High School

10. City Prison Doors †

11. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah