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Stars of Track and Field
Centuries Before Love And War
Sidecho
There’s a stunning and desolate beauty to Stars of Track and Field’s debut album. The crestfallen vocals of singer Kevin Calaba backed by lonely synths and hushed electronica conflate into one big murky sparkle, giving the album a dark and stirring sheen. Obsessed with snowy landscapes, burning cities and the hopelessness of war, Calaba pilots this riveting collection of doleful new wave into vast and tragic emotional terrains. The twitchy opener “Centuries” is a chilling invocation, which captures the cold recruitment of young men being converted instantly to soldiers (“Put your coat on and don’t ask why”). The sentiment brings to mind New Order’s “Love Vigilantes,” and when Calaba sings “Pieces fall/I am not coming home,” the fate of both songs’ narrators are eerily similar. So with its main character dead before the first song is over, Centuries Before Love And War is free to move in and out of time and the effects of this travel are deeply moving. The swirling “Movies Of Antarctica” is a chilling post-mortem (“I’m colder now/I’m standing still), which comes with am almost disembodied ache; the soaring “US Mile 5,” is told from the perspective of a dead soldier lying next to his fallen comrades; and the ponderous, but grinding “Arithmatik” summons a moment in time:“You came here for sunset last year/Your favorite film was flickering.” “I’ll be alright,” Calaba finally sings on the closer “Fantastic,” but because it’s preceded by the warning “Run for your life,” it’s hard to imagine anyone here’s going to get out alive. Referencing Echo and the Bunnymen, Depeche Mode, and Radiohead, this young Portland band has emerged with an album of sonic nuance, but also one of great social seriousness and responsibility. Centuries Before Love And War may not be as obvious of a concept album as The Wall, but it doesn’t need to be. It gently guides us through the corruption and devastation of war by individualizing the plight of one man who’s never going to make it home.
—Alex Green
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