Velvet Starlings: Technicolor Shakedown Review

Is it better to judge an album based on first impressions or after months and months of listening and increasing bias for or against the tracks?

I walked into the first listen of this album prepared to conjure up another scathing review for my favorite band of all time after the disaster of a track that was “Everyday’s a Friday Night.” Hearing the songs played from when frontman Christian Gisborne hosted his Thursday night Float Down Stream sessions, I knew from the start that my view of this first full-length record was not going to be a positive one. Whether it be the relentless tone of the songs adopting the similar sound of the first throughout over half the record, or the disappointment from the pandemic postponing the still yet-to-be-released Pacific Standard Time, I was not at all excited for Technicolor Shakedown.

But here we are: five moves in four months, a third of a semester of university, and at least 30 full listens of this record later, and I can’t find it in myself to be a critic anymore. Is it bias? Is it a matured opinion? Is it simply an emotional attachment enabled by timing? I couldn’t care less what it is – I just can’t drag myself away from it. With the modern, 60s-influenced sound of the record, it’s hard to speak ill of it no matter if many of the songs carry a similar theme to them.

If there’s one opinion that has not changed since my first listen of the album, I still cannot believe how good Velvet Starlings sounds on this record. I had my complaints from both of their EPs and every past single I have yet heard from the band, but I can’t find anything wrong when it comes to the rich sound quality, the genuine, powerful vocals from Gisborne, or the aesthetic of the microphones and guitar tones. It’s easy to compare with the lead single, “Back of the Train,” where the band comes out sounding more garage-rock than ever (with the exception of “Broken Soul” off the Love Everything, Love Everyone… EP) with the hazy hue coating the vocals, the raspy noises of the guitar, and the hollow crashing of the drums.

This whole album shows the band taking on a more garage-rock sound compared to the more Beatles-esque Velvet Starlings EP. Even as I complain with the persistent tone of the songs, that’s not to say I hate the songs. “She Said (She Said)” has the melody that hooks you into the album as the opener and reminds you of how much you missed Gisborne’s sweet, sweet vocals. “Checkmate” has the chorus that you can’t dispel from your head where it lives rent-free. “No Regrets” has got your head bobbing with the zig-zagging pitches, and “Technicolor Shakedown” has you jumping up from your chair and bouncing back and forth on your toes dancing. The best of the album has to be “Can’t Control” without question – I haven’t talked to a single person that “can’t get [this song] off [their] mind.” The vocals, the keyboard, the aesthetic, the sound quality – this track has it all down to a T. Gisborne really knows how to play with our emotions as he gets up and personal in the bridge with “You come on over in the dead of night” before jumping right back into his screaming vocals for the chorus that mesmerizes you with his incredible range – not just in pitch, but in style and technique, as well.

Then again, we do get the outlier of the bunch that reminds me of why I held a hatred of this album in the first place. I’ve known of “Young Ideas” since I first started researching the band in 2017, and I used to think it charming in the outdated live video of the former duo. It had a rebellious, yet still mature outlook that either looked back upon years of being a teenager or looked forward to the future of becoming a young adult. “Young Ideas” is not that song I heard four years ago. Strip away the lyrics, and we are left with the background music from a home workout video. Add the lyrics back, and we see a cringe-infested, overbearingly peppy track with an annoyingly bouncy chord progression and vocals that seem way too optimistic to be genuine.

But then we return to the laid-back tracks of both “There’s Nobody There” and “Colours on the Canvas,” and I remember what hope I held for the album even when I knew it would never be a favorite. The reverb of “There’s Nobody There” combined with the repeating lyric, “But there’s nobody there” increase the image of the “ghostly echo” of the lost connection with the other mentioned party and the idea of isolation and desperation for repaired communication. Even better, “Colours on the Canvas” hands you a paintbrush and carries you along a journey of colors and paintings through sunsets, and clover hills, and crystal-blue lakes. After doing animation for a while, there’s no song I want to animate over more than “Colours on the Canvas.” The vivid images it paints in your mind, the persimmon sun, the “indigo [that] blankets our starry sky,” the cloak of clovers; I can’t say that Gisborne has written a song more vivid and beautiful than this track. It’s as if he has taken your hand and pulled you into a daydream full of the sunshine and moonbeams and color.

And yet still with this album’s dancing instrumentals and lyrics urging you to “turn it up and turn it on,” I find myself laying lifeless in a puddle on the floor listening to it. The energy combined with the desperation in the lyrics of “Can’t Control,” “Checkmate,” and “There’s Nobody There” leave me stupefied in a trance of emotional turmoil and confusion without entirely dragging me down into an existential crisis thanks to the upbeat instrumentals. Maybe it is the timing of the release of the album that so drastically altered my opinion of it, but nevertheless, you still can’t deny the perfection of sound on the Velvet Starlings’ Technicolor Shakedown.

Rating: 7.0/10