Description

Sine Star Project – Blue Born Earth Boy

9 track debut CD album.

Sometimes something comes along that jumps out of the speakers and hits you right between the ears. Sine Star Project sound like they’ve been beamed down from another planet, which is the sort of statement that can get you into trouble if you haven’t got the songs to back it up.

An anagram of band leader Peter J. Croissant’s name, Sine Star Project formed from the ashes of former band Savalas. Classically trained Croissant, who had been working as a producer and engineer – most notably for fellow Southamptonites, Delays – gathered together bassist Karl Evans, guitarists Mike Davies and Dan Little and drummer Alec Lowe (who happens to be 17th in line to the Swedish throne). They released their debut album Blue Born Earth Boy on OLI in 2006.

Sine Star Project’s ambitious, delicious debut album, Blue Born Earth Boy is a mellifluous musical mosaic that picks you up and brings you down to earth again with a bump – all in the space of a perfectly performed 42 minutes. Peter J. Croissant – multi-instrumentalist, multi-talented creative captain of Sine Star Project is one of the few true originals of modern music, although tellingly, neither he nor anyone else quite knows it yet. It’s only a matter of time.

As is the case with most truly original albums, the influences that have informed Blue Born Earth Boy are pretty tricky to pin down, although you can hear glimpses of everything from the Buckleys (Tim and Jeff), Elliott Smith, Aimee Mann, Love, Ry Cooder and Pink Floyd to The Flaming Lips, American Music Club and Grant Lee Buffalo…even Berlioz and Bruckner.

Croissant’s fragile falsetto and delicate, wistful compositions seem to come from some long and secret tradition that seems to have become lost in the translation of modern times. You get the impression that under the calm and unruffled surfaces of Sine Star Project there are complex and deceptively deep currents that could drag you under and drown you in sound. Placing this music into a musical category is like trying to shoot fish in a barrel full of water.

Sine Star Project is not the sound of the underground or the sound of the overground. Back in the ’50s, American critic, Whitey Balliett once described jazz as ‘the sound of surprise.’ This is the sound of avant-garde rock music played with a free jazz attitude and a razor-sharp set of songs with soaring melodies and breathtakingly beautiful words. Open your ears and dive into Sine Star Project’s chic and unique first album – a multilayered, multicoloured ocean of sound. Blue Born Earth Boy truly is the sound of surprise.