Nathaniel Sutton – Starlite

Earlier this year I wrote a review of Yacht’s latest album See Mystery Lights, wherin I compared the band to happy, sincere robots, giving you an electropop hug of sorts. Well as it turns out, Starlite, the second release from one-man-band Nathaniel Sutton, embodies the flip side of this description. As the album art of a robot crying a lone tear may suggest, Sutton’s tracks are the anthems of gloomy artificial intelligence.

However, unfortunately for Sutton, this robot persona lacks the endearing qualities of sad androids we may have known (Douglas Adams’s Marvin) or the techno-influenced tunes we heard on Yacht’s album. Rather, Sutton’s songs bring to mind the goth kids you knew in high school who may have seemed more thoughtful than the football players, but if you talked to them just turned out to be mopey and self-centered. In fact, with lyrics like “I’ve fallen victim to all the popular trends/ And when the end comes will you still be my best friend?” those mopey goth kids are probably the demographic Sutton should be hoping to market from.

In short summary, Starlite is composed of a synth, a guitar, monotone vocals and lyrics that were yanked from someone’s Deadjournal. Throughout the first six tracks the music itself is basic, inoffensive rock, but Sutton’s vocals are dark like a goth band and soft like chalk dust. When he uses this voice to sing verses that could come out of a lonely, junior high poet’s notebook (at one point Sutton actually rhymes the words “poet” and “know it”), he encompasses the sad robot on the album’s cover completely.

Another note on the physical packaging of Starlite: It was one of the few CDs I’ve encountered these days that include the lyrics in the liner notes. While this was a feature I looked for in the albums I bought when I was about fifteen, it ended up disadvantaging Sutton: I was able to see the poor songwriting on Starlite before I heard it.

To his credit, Sutton tries to change things up throughout Starlite. He lets out some anger in “1933″ and the latter half of the album finds him going on a synthed-out techno adventure with his music. Unfortunately, these variations prove to only be for the worse. Whereas his poor man’s Cure schtick feels at home on tracks that otherwise sound like normal, bland goth rock, Sutton’s efforts seem downright laughable when he takes a stab at anything else. While the opening track, “Starlite” is a cheesy love song, it’s bearable, by track ten, Sutton is engaging in such a poor Nine Inch Nails rip-off with “Creepy Crawlers” that it’s embarrassing.

The best we can hope for Nathaniel Sutton is that his record finds itself in the hands of a 13 year old social outcast. Starlite gives the impression of being an album that could possibly be endearing with its simple words and cartoon robots, but the execution brings about the reality of an unpleasant listening experience.

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Tagged as: Alberta, Electronic pop/rock

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