Sound
Stars In Battledress draw strongly on traditional folk sources (most obviously in their use of folk instrumentation such as harmonium and autoharp, and in the specifically English inflections of Richard Larcombe's singing voice), 1990s American art rock (such as Don Caballero) and the complex "psychedelic mediaeval" music of the related British bands Cardiacs and The Sea Nymphs. Though the band have displayed a reluctance to be associated directly with progressive rock, the complexity of their music and the use of expansive keyboard textures have sometimes seen them labelled as a progressive rock act: Richard Larcombe's distinctly English tenor delivery has sometimes seen him compared to Richard Sinclair (Caravan, Hatfield and the North, etc.).
Stars In Battledress are also notable for Richard Larcombe's literate and allusive post-modern lyrics, which span traditional topics such as love songs and social advancement while also cross-referencing more unusual subjects such as silent film, doppelgangers, historical figures such as Havelock Ellis, the English landscape painters Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable and the work of the Canadian hard-rock band Voivod (sometimes incorporating several of these subjects within the same song).
Read more about this topic: Stars In Battledress (band)
Famous quotes containing the word sound:
“He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“Every now and then, when you’re on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It’s a sound you can’t get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you’ve hit them where they live.”
—Shelley Winters (b. 1922)
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)