monoblogue music: “The Starman” (single/video) by Lord Sonny the Unifier

This is going to be a “value-added” review. I was originally asked to write on the single and video in the title, which this Brooklyn-based band put out back on February 8. However, one of the links was to the advance review copy of the album that The Starman is featured on, called “Final Notice!” So I’m going to talk about that a little bit, in part because The Starman is very representative of the collection as a whole.

Like I said, the video and single came out last month and, rather than make you deal with Spotify I’ll just embed the video for your viewing pleasure. It’s the same song.

The second single and video from the forthcoming release “Final Notice!” by Lord Sonny the Unifier.

Trust me, this video is nowhere near as weird as their first one from the album, the initial single Right In Your I.

But if you didn’t get the vibe from the latest video – which, admittedly, needs a lot of explanation to allow me to “get it” – you might correctly imagine this album would almost have been more at home dropping in 1979 than 2019. Strangely enough, the influential records listed by the band for their forthcoming full-length are smack dab representative of that album rock era.

I can hear a lot of those influences – or at least the ones that I know, since I haven’t listened to every track therein – on “Final Notice!”, which I believe is slated to come out in mid-April. And I have to say that, while all the songs are different enough to hold your interest, there’s really not a bad one in the bunch. Obviously there are some I like better than others, such as First In Space and March Forth (the latter really should be released to the world on Monday, naturally) but they all are pretty enjoyable in their own right. And the cool thing is that they can use 2019 technology now to make 1979 sound even better.

Now if you believe the backstory to this album – and after watching their videos there are a couple doubts creeping into my mind, but we’ll go ahead and roll with it – this band was a successor project for lead singer Greg Jiritano after he a) did a 6-year “extreme sonic experimentation” with a collaborator and band that produced music which couldn’t be performed live and went unreleased, and b) decided after plan A didn’t pan out to do a DIY project only to have the studio burn to the ground shortly before its release, destroying all of his work. So you are listening to plan C, which may very well be a good name for a band or album. (The rest of the Unifier band: Tyler Wood on keyboards, Derek Nievergelt on bass, and drummer Carmine Covelli. With a name like that, he had to be a drummer.)

Given the subtle but pleasing strangeness of Lord Sonny the Unifier and their album from another era, I can’t say plan C wasn’t the correct play.