Starsailor
Silence Is Easy

(Capitol)

First Appeared in The Music Box, July 2004, Volume 11, #7

Written by John Metzger

Phil Spector may have produced only two of the tracks on Starsailor’s sophomore effort Silence Is Easy, but his presence fills every nook and cranny of the album. Swooping strings cascade down the giant wall of sound created by layers of guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards as Spector’s ornate ’60s pop style is updated for the new millennium. Indeed, there’s as much Travis embedded in the music as there is Darlene Love or The Ronettes, though U2’s mega-selling classic All That You Can’t Leave Behind also weighs heavily upon the collection’s super-sized songs. Elsewhere, Four to the Floor fuses Philly soul with U2’s dance-crazed Discothèque, and amidst the album’s more folk-oriented strains, frontman James Walsh unleashes his emotive, Jeff Buckley-like wails with all the melodramatic yearning he can muster. Granted, Silence Is Easy isn’t quite on par with the gems crafted by Starsailor’s predecessors, but it is an outing full of experimental growth, one that demonstrates the band’s restless energy as well as its knack for delivering passionately infectious anthems with enormously graceful exuberance.

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Ratings

1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!

Copyright © 2004 The Music Box