The title of the second Star Parks album is slyly misleading because it isn’t a directly accurate description of the music. It is, however, thoughtfully anachronistic, and in that way, it does resemble these Sounds.
Four years after its debut long-player, Don’t Dwell, the Texas-based ensemble follows up with meaningfully pretty grandiosity, spinning pastel webs around the shards of a broken heart. The shards belong to frontman Andy Bianculli, whose voice—high, courtly, hazy, aware of its own fragility—feels more quotidian than anything else in these 11 tracks, which spiral outward and upward into elaborations of influences ranging from Burt Bacharach to the Flaming Lips.
Sometimes, those influences make for pile-ups, as when a George Harrison riff, by way of the Archies, marches alongside a Motown rhythm, by way of the Four Seasons, and the result is “Something More,” until a bright blast of horns tumbles everything into the air. Or when a pace suitable for a very old-fashioned and intricately constructed carousel turns out to be just as suitable for an acid trip accompanied by early Pink Floyd, and that’s the path clip-clopped by “Hobby Horse.”
There are simpler—if hardly simple—songs, too, like “Landlady,” a plausible companion piece to My Morning Jacket’s “Librarian,” working off the vocal similarities between Bianculli and MMJ’s Jim James while taking an economic rather than erotic approach.
Even as interludes like “Not Now Brian” restate melodic themes, Star Parks illuminates the shards that Bianculli holds up. Soon, he and the band reach the resigned clarity of “Standing in the Daylight” and the smiling-through-sadness promise of “All Your Saturdays at Once.” At its close, the truly sly thing about The New Sounds of Late Capitalism is not its title but how it stays in the mind, like a lost love whose memory remains tangible, beautiful and painful.
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Star Parks will play the Cactus Club, 2496 S. Wentworth Ave., on Saturday, Feb. 22.
