Starsailor seem to me to be a band blessed with poor luck. I’ve always found James Walsh’s voice interesting and the band certainly wrote some good pop tunes. It seemed for a while that they would take over from The Verve as the indie band with mass market appeal… but the Coldplay came along. This album, coming seemingly out of nowhere, immediately shrugs off one of the most frequent labels attached to the band, “dreary” or “depressing” this most certainly is not. In fact, there’s a sort of uplifting charm to this album. Opening track and first single ‘Tell Me It’s Not Over’ is a great slab of pop (even if the subject matter – lost love – is one of the most over used in music) and there are plenty more tracks where that came from. This is a bold new direction, a rainbow of colour from a band previously accused of painting only in shades of beige. It’s probably fair to say that the band aren’t going to suddenly become cool on the back of this, and you won’t earn scene points for admitting to enjoying it, but that won’t bother me… I wear flares and have the Theme From Cheers on my iPod, I don’t care about cool, I just enjoy good music and I’ve found it here!
check out Starsailor at: www.myspace.com/starsailor