Starship –  People In The Walls (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

It is perhaps easier to understand Starship with a bit of context thrown in for good measure, not that information about the band seems easy to come by on the supermation info-highway that has become the way we view the world these days. Search any of the titular components and you end up with results varying from Grace Slick’s dodgy later chapter of musical excess to how loud should you play your music if you don’t want to annoy the neighbours…which may be more useful. People In The Walls seem to have the sort of on-line anonymity reserved only for winners of The Voice, you have to love them for that.

The context here is the album that this mercurial track is found on. What Noise Do They Make is a collection of warped mash ups, instrumental work outs where genres are a dirty word and musical traditions irrelevant. Rock and experimental dance, post-punk weirdness and forward thinking futurism, dark and heavy psychedelic grooves and warped pop melodics all swirl around either working in harmony or fighting for control.

In this sonic maelstrom you find the track Starship which kicks off like an early Yes album but soon finds its way into something more akin to a Hawkwind inspired nervous breakdown. You can throw in the likes of Camel in their most intense and even Gong when they weren’t being quite so silly but the fact that the references are so aged and so far out musically speaking shows that People In The Walls have little comparison in history and certainly have no obvious competitors in this day and age.

Starship is dark and intense, pounding about on vicious bass lines and tribal-industrial back beats which are then covered in growling synth washes and angelic sonic finger prints. What does it all mean? I really don’t know and I’m the one trying to capture it all in word form. Maybe some music is just too slippery, to original, too clever to be written about. Indeed you could expend reams of paper and hours of inspired scribbling and still only capture half of what is happening here.

Maybe it is best that you accept it when I tell you that this is like nothing that you have heard before and that you need to not only hear this track but do so in the context of the full album. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’ll change you life…or something.