Artist: Stars Like Fleas
Album: The Ken Burns Effect
Label: Talitres Records
Year: 2007
Reviewed by: Woodstock Slim
Roll up Skeletons Of The New City fans, roll up Red Kraola fans, this is what its all about! Never before have I heard a record with so many wind instruments, man! It's a fresh kind of sonic. Electronica has been chipping away at a lot of new frontiers on the sonic front but I guess the path through the mountains were found here in 'The Ken Burns Effect' album. Montgomery Knotts' vocal which almost hides behind the sound scapes and peeps like daisies out of the snow when spring comes to early. The drums and the bass and the guitars are pushed way back there with the vocals and the wind instruments ripps the wastelands like the lapping sound of the water against the oscillatory boat in Water world. That haunting country sounds manages to creep right on through the disobedient free roaming sound of the multitudes of lips on wind instruments seeking a home or an ear to rest against.
Stars Like Fleas was formed in Brooklyn in the winter of 1999. Their limited edition debut, mixed by Stars of the Lid’s Adam Wiltzie and mastered by Shimmy disc’s Kramer (an early fan), perplexed all who heard it, and sold out every copy (and was digitally re-released by File
13 on Sep 12, 2006) – the group soon after disappeared and never played a show until late 2005, when it re-emerged as a 5-11 piece group of friends chewing up and spitting out whatever
instruments or objects were needed at the time.
Having quietly created 2 very different, highly-murmured about, and mostly hand-traded cult releases over the past several years, Stars Like Fleas re-emerged in late 2005 with new clothing and sonic plastic surgery, immediately creating a stir and an overnight name for themselves
in a sentiment-suspicious Brooklyn, selling out exponentially larger shows in a variety of secret spaces (and not-so-secret spaces like a recent sold-out show at Bowery Ballroom) with the likes of Deerhoof, Grizzly Bear, Excepter, Gang Gang Dance, Comets On Fire, Kyp Malone of TV On The Radio, Man Man, Beirut, O’Death and Akron/Family.
