STARSHIP EARTH: B. HASEMEYER'S UNIQUE ROMANTICISM

B. Hasemeyer’s Starship Earth (available through Black Box Recordings on May 4) is a specialized trek into the solemn and doleful, serving music that shatters those bothersome, plebeian concerns and yet never allows one to forget them. 

To mount the mood, Hasemeyer (aka Daniel Pruett) creates a sense of terse irony among his album's tracks. They're never futuristic, despite what the title implies. They're more Woody Guthrie, on-the-road-strung, with a raw-rooted purr that would make B.B. King bow in respect.  (In addition, Hasemyer’s vocals invoke a fold of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits: perfect for his jagged deviations.) At the same time, the submissions are never country, blues, electronic or anything that could or should be categorized. It’s pure Hasemeyer, and Starship Earth is its own buck-the-system, looking-for-religion thing. 

One will recognize this most in “Bathead” (perhaps my favorite selection): a crazed, skittish, culminating composition that might play as one is pressed against a curb, reaching upward, over the clouds, into the stars. (Get the conceptual gist?) 

On the other hand, the lead-in woes are more consistently coarse, but no less pounding, particularly the echoing “Boobies”, which brings to mind--hey, you decide. Sure, it might be something salacious (a tease of forbidden fruit); then again, it could be a nod to those cackling fools who restrict one's growth and stomp one's space. Whatever it is, it’s there for good reason--and good grabbing--no matter the appointment or outcome.

Traces of “Boobies” can be found in other (later) tracks, which bridge and buffer certain "softer", saltier selections, such as the vibrating “Chorus”, the woeful “Wires” and the inflamed “Witching”, which brews madness and fear. 

Of the "harder" tracks,  “Cherry Key” is the most melodious and strumming of the latter, but ‘Kong Fuzd” complements its groove, even if its “in the middle”, gaming motif relays something rammed, repetitive and doomed. The rifting “Social Revolution at the Gas Station” is all the more pedestrian, presenting a discordant but oh-so-sweet, analogous place where the beaten can bemoan their disenfranchised circumstance and map a vain release.

Maybe that’s the whole peaking point of Starship Earth: People travel with rage and misguided goals, looking beyond their stations for some salvation, but in that gloomy search lies the romanticism that makes despair look bright and right.  

Life is what it is, and so is Hasemeyer and his turbulent creation.

Fill your ears at … https://blackboxrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/starship-earth?fbclid=IwAR37OlbJuGDKU7fyDc7uRubJKu-atPyqCGOgRmq-08WvcUn1eFjrCBbSpls.