Shooting Star

With a patchwork recording process thats worth acknowledging because it can be heard in the final product, Golden Apples fifth album, Shooting Star, was captured with a variety of collaborators, at multiple locations, and with a selection of headspaces and inspirations. Consistent, however, is the welcoming, raw-and-ready delivery of bandleader Russell Edling, along with his world-weary lyrics and his melodic and jangly, college rock-informed musical sensibility. So fans need not despair, even if the resulting album is on the capricious side. Sounding something like a reverb-heavy slow dance, opener "Another Grand Offering for the Swine," for instance, is a brief, demo-like entry having something to do with the food chain and a deliverance that sets one "free from the takers and the leavers." The next track, "Noonday Demon," is not only energetic and giddy but lushly noisy, offering sweet harmonies and a tuneful melody despite its title having been taken from a book subtitled "An Atlas of Depression" and its lyrics being about spiraling due to anxiety and paranoia. "Mind," the next song, sounds more like Transformer-era Lou Reed as its words question what is and isnt real. Elsewhere, the trippier, organ-accompanied indie rock of "Freeeee" wants people to stay the heck away ("Tell them all/Get out from under me/So I can breathe"), "Happy" is a 90s-like slacker anthem about shutting down negative self-talk, and "Song for the Record Exchange" revisits proto-punk for the revelation that "Theres no such thing as time/Just reminders of whats been by." To call Shooting Star a feel-good album may strain credulity, all things considered, but it nonetheless remains musically uplifting through all its twists and turns, and when it ends on the incongruously tedious, nearly six-minute quasi-instrumental "How Long Must I Stay in This Place," with its repeated two-beat guitar motif, it might even elicit a chuckle. ~ Marcy Donelson