It’s been a weird few weeks, to say the least, with the weirdness sure to reverberate through the winter and the rest of my days. But to borrow an aphorism from Hunter Thompson, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
There’s a YouTube video from early 2023 of Caitlin Starr, accompanying herself on electric guitar, unveiling a string of songs for/at Pancake Recording Studios. Prior to singing her songs, in an interview, the Brooklyn-based musician provides rudimentary background info: born and raised in NYC’s East Village, college in California, and then back to the Big Apple to pursue her dreams. The hesitancy spills over to portions of the performance itself, especially the between-song moments—no doubt thrown by the cameras and people milling about behind them. Yet a hypnotic quality cuts through once she sings. It’s quite cool, essentially capturing an artist in the process of becoming.
If life was a movie, there’d be a smash cut to the next clip, from June 2023, of Starr, a bassist and drummer laying down her guitar-first grooves at a Rubulad, a Brooklyn art space known for its Warholesque scene (or so the Yelp reviews lead me to believe). Like many such clips, including many of mine, the sound quality isn’t the best—but it doesn’t much matter. There’s nothing suspect about the performance itself.
Another cut would jump to this past summer, when the sound reverberates with her growing confidence from beneath a tent on Randall Island while performing the song that is now her first single. To my ears, her music echoes the early ‘90s stylings of such groups as Belly, the Breeders, Nirvana and the Juliana Hatfield Three—though I’d wager Starr would credit more recent artists and bands. (She reminds me a bit of Chelsea King, too, which tells me they’re likely mining the same influences.)
The montage for this portion of the film would end this past Friday, when she released said single, “Take Me Down.” It’s the first taste of a heady five-track EP that’s slated to be released this fall. She handles guitar, while Ryan Palmer plucks the bass and Nick Grasso thumps the drums. It’s everything good about this thing called rock music. It’s dramatic and punky, crunchy, with a killer riff and compelling vocals. In another era, it’d be in heavy rotation on such “dare to be different” radio stations as WLRI and WDRE.
The Old Grey Cat 