Barsuk
2006
Drowaton
About This Album
With their engaging third full-length, the Starlight Mints should put to rest the comparisons with fellow Oklahomans the Flaming Lips. Yes, the Starlight Mints concoct oddball pop with a musical pawn shop's worth of instrumentation, but the sonic touchstones for Drowaton -- "not a word," in reverse -- are probably more Kinks, Beatles, and Camper Van Beethoven than Wayne Coyne. As usual with the Mints, there's plenty of quirkiness to go around, which is both the band's strength and occasional Achilles heel. Despite their relative brevity, Mints' songs are expansive affairs, chock-full of soulful horn sections and lush string, keyboard, and synth arrangements, multiple tempo and time changes, and Allan Vest's shape-shifting vocals. "Pumpkin" opens the record with Vest adopting Curtis Mayfield's falsetto over Stax blasts from the horns and fuzzed-out keyboards; Vest channels Ray Davies on the strings-driven "Seventeen Devils," and sounds like David Byrne fronting the Clash on "Eyes of the Night" (which lifts the slashing guitar syncopation straight off of Combat Rock's "Know Your Rights"). "The Killers" is a straightforward acoustic folk tune, "Rosemarie" is "Penny Lane"-like Beatles pop buffeted by horns and cello swirls, and "The Bee" recalls the nervous energy of Armed Forces-era Elvis Costello, while the menacing stomp and circus strings of the instrumental "Rhino" would have fit quite neatly on an early Camper Van Beethoven record.
Track List (try tracks 1,3,5,7,8 and 12)

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.