3/22

gabriel palacios
on
the cranes, “starblood”

(march vladness)

For 2025’s March Second Chanceness, each day in march we are bringing back an essay that previously lost in the first round of previous March Xness tournaments for your consideration.

March Xness is a fun tournament, but also at times a cruel one! Each year 32 essays and essayists lose in the first round (and 63 of 64 will bow out before a winner is crowned). Because of the pace of the first round, many of our readers probably don’t get a chance to closely read all of the essays each year! So for 2025 we wanted to dig some of these out of the archive and give them another read, this time on their own, no competitor. Just a moment of attention and even of glory. The Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee picked these based on reader nominations as particularly worthy of getting a second look. There are many brilliant essays that lose each year. Which are your favorites? This year we’re not voting: we’re only reading and celebrating and remembering. The tournament proper will come back in 2026 with March Sadness (lottery entry link in the menu above). We hope these great essays will again earn your love. Signed, the Official March Second Chanceness Selection Committee

Reencountering these words has me thinking about how recordings approximate the experience of live music. This calculus has become even more slippery since the time of publication. It's become commonplace for guitarists to use amplifier modelers which feed directly into the loudspeakers of a venue, rather than having actual amplifiers and monitor speakers on stage moving all of that air. Pitch correction is an audience expectation, whether the audience is thinking about it or not. Layers of artifice and simulation, and a movement away from people, bodies, magnets, electricity. But they said that back in the 80s, right? At that time digital synthesis and sequencing were brand new. For me, the difference is this: the cathartic, cinematic drama of the most archetypically 80s music was built off of the tension created by combining the rigid timekeeping and crystalline, otherworldly textures of drum machines/synths with the big old human messy emoting of the vocals and guitars. This was true up through 1991, when "Starblood" was released.

There have been other shifts, too. Ticket prices have exploded, and those premium prices, along with premium VIP add-ons have turned live music into a rarefied... set up for disappointment? Lol. Fugazi charged $5 in part, because the affordability gave them license to suck. Human musicians will occasionally do that. Robert Smith of the Cure, it should be pointed out (the Cure figures prominently in the essay), has been the loudest voice to speak out against these abuses. Neil Young this week announced that he would discontinue his VIP-experience gouging, citing the Cure as having shamed him out of it.

I leave you with the greatest comment on the Youtube channel archiveofficial's upload of "Starblood:"

@iliashomerus9981
1 year ago
i remember the days i was in the boy-scouts, waking up every morning with this song, what a great time was that!

gabriel palacios: 1991-1993: A STARBLOOD TERROR ON CASSETTE

Cranes come from Portsmouth, the only island city in the UK.

“Starblood” is not so much a song as it is a descent.

It seems obvious to me that the speaker in this song doesn’t really possess any actual “starblood” with which I can be kissed. It’s an empty threat that happens to strike terror in me. To be terrorized is to be stunned with the possibility of immense harm.

I’ll kiss you with my starblood
I’ll kiss you with my starblood

Often when I hear music, the kind of music created by groups of people together, I try to visualize the players arranged in a room. I place the musicians somehow in an acoustic space and the psychotic reverberation of “Starblood” really throws my imaginary depth of field. That voice belongs to Alison Shaw, the sound of an undrownable child ghost: it taunts me from a boarded-up well, or comes ripping across a hellish underwater battlefield of drums and guitars, like that guitar guy on wheels in “Mad Max: Fury Road.” As I listen to it now, this terrible submersion more than anything else bodies forth the squelched fidelity of the cassette tape format. This is a song that should be listened to only on cassette, and when I say cassette I mean played on a tape deck with unclean heads, a warped belt and considerable wow and flutter. Do cassettes actually sound good? This is a useless question making the rounds in our current cultural moment, and to hear the Telegraph tell it, no, the cassette is “a hipster trend too far.” Still, the cassette offers a warm, fuzzy counterpoint to the icy separation of compact disc audio, and no other format has achieved the durability, the convenience factor, the Teddy Ruxpin mind-body integration of the compact cassette. Wings of Joy, the album “Starblood” belongs to, arrived in September 1991, a long year in which punk broke, as they love to remind us. “They” of course refers to the shadowy government cultural ministry that subsidizes the careers of Maroon 5 and Jennifer Lopez in perpetuity. They fail to memorialize this year as one in which the compact disc overtook the cassette (in regions other than my bedroom, where I would spend several more years in the toil of coaxing mylar ribbons back into plastic shells). The centerpiece of my adolescent bedroom was a dual-tape karaoke machine, a Christmas gift, from the first American blush of that fad. There were two knobs on the machine: volume and a crude digital reverb that made a wickedly pleasing hiss.

My wound is deep and may never be mended
You never received the love that I sent

I’ve experienced Cranes in live performance exactly .5 times. It was only as I, along with my sisters, my cousins, and our parents (minigoths under close supervision), made our way to upper-tier seats in the America West Arena, to see the Cure on the Wish tour. What I heard was only what ping-ponged through the concrete hallways. More recently, I managed to avoid John Legend in exactly this way, when I was really there to see Sade. But I was sorry I missed the Cranes—I’m still sorry, though maybe I didn’t, in fact, miss anything. This uncrossable distance, this trail of an echo with no origin, through which I heard Alison Shaw, the here but not really, is exactly what Cranes achieve on this recording, and it’s worth pointing out that this song in its haunting aggression and gothic terror is not so representative of the Cranes catalog, which tends more toward the haunting and less toward the aggression and terror of “Starblood.”

Our love is mortal and it seems so short
And it feels no dream

In the Wish tour program (programme? Do they make these anymore?) Robert Smith (along with the other members) contributes a list of favorites: favorite TV, movie, music. Some of this stuff reads now as charmingly pretentious peak-Cure (Robert’s likes: sea, twilight, dreams, silence, understanding) and certain references may have been too aggressively British for me to penetrate, but it was my bible that year. I can still recall Robert’s favorite bands of 1992 by heart. For shoegazing, it was a very good year: Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Curve, Cranes, Star Turn, Mazzy Star. Dinosaur Jr. was in there, too. I immediately sought out and loved each one of them, with the exception of Star Turn, for whom the only trace that exists online is a Discogs entry for a UK disco 45 credited to “Star Turn on 45 Pints.” Favorite book, favorite place—here’s one: favorite item of clothing. “Baggy black jumper & tight black dress.” I understood next to nothing. I was such a poser that I claimed it all.

I could believe it's no dream
But it seems it's getting shorter

You could make the argument (I will make the argument) that I’ve been a poser in all aspects of my participation in life. The terror of not being quite as advertised is a defining terror. Terror of the first night at home from the hospital with my firstborn, whole person I’m supposed to know how to care for. Terror of showing up to work year after year at the call centers and pretending to be somebody’s boss, unable to muster a single fuck more than anyone I ever fired, even those ones I most secretly admire: that breed of new hire who doesn’t even bother to ingratiate themself, only there to collect paid training until the criminal background check comes back. Terror of snapping in and out of writer headspace to perform whatever ad hoc adulthood for the people who depend on me before it’s too late. Terror of being addressed by a stranger in Spanish, knowing that I probably won’t be able to suitably respond. Terror of covering one eye to peek at the poem submissions on my Submittable page, terror of imagining who I thought I was when I wrote those poems months ago.

Still I could believe it's no dream

I spent the summer before 9th grade reading Robert Smith’s favorite books. Siddhartha was a struggle, Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar stayed in rotation. I supplemented this reading list with Cure interviews. Suffice it to say I’d picked up a couple whilsts along the way, along with some colourful, superfluous u’s, for which I traded in all upper-case letters e.e. cummings-style. I also played fast and loose with punctuation (ellipses for no reason) to the point that when I entered 9th grade, Mr. McCarthy, my English teacher sat me down in private to let me know that he had picked up on some difficulties I was having with the basic mechanics of the English language and perhaps I could benefit from some extra help. I had been accepted into University High, an “accelerated public high school” where I would barely last the year, because their thing was requiring effort, and the ongoing maintenance of that charade would only have wrecked my health. Mr. McCarthy thanked me for the meeting and offered me a little brownie square from his adult lunch. I wonder if he read my surname on the class roster and mistook my ugly Anglophile phase for a Mexican-American bilingual confusion. Later that year, he would devote a class period or two to his lyrical interpretation of Brian Adam’s “Summer of 69.”

Cos it gleams on the water
Yes it gleams, yeah it gleams

Cassette tape, of the pre-recorded type, usually wasn’t any good in the audiophile sense, because it didn’t have to be. The media most often available was cheap, cheaply produced, but rugged, and it continued to generate profit clear up to the Willenium. That said, blank tapes of higher quality were available, provided you had hi-fi equipment that could record onto metal and chrome media.

Still, even on the shabbiest of tape (and you could always place masking tape over the anti-piracy tabs of prerecorded cassettes and reuse them) the home recording was always where tape-culture lived, the idea of tape as reflection of the way we were, and did our voice really sound like that. It was a democratic archive for anyone to register their story, either for fun or to be used as evidence. Last weekend, my eight year old son scored an old dictaphone at the swap meet. It came with a micro cassette inside, recorded upon by whomever had purchased it new. Soon enough, this recording became a source of disturbance to his young imagination, and maybe we parents felt creepy, too, to have eavesdropped on the young-at-one-time voice on the tape sing disco-era songs in a strange voice and talk at some length about their parents’ divorce.

My wound is deep and may never be mended
But my love is deep
And I'll kiss you with my starblood

The first known recordings of the human voice were phonautograms, recorded on the phonautograph. On this machine, the voice could be recorded, but only analyzed, not played back. To listen must have been too terrifying a proposition.

“Starblood” is less a song than a descent.