Starflyer 59’s echoes of yesterday

“I’m kind of always sucked down the rabbit hole of memory lane,” says Jason Martin. “It’s kind of a way of coping with the never-ending changes that are always coming.”

As the sole constant member of the alternative Christian band Starflyer 59, Martin knows a thing or two about changes. But the memory lane he refers to is the personal nostalgia running through his band’s new long player, Lust for Gold (Velvet Blue). “909,” for example, the first single, takes its title from the Southern California area code of his youth and features the refrain, “The best days of my life were in the 909.”

He could also be talking about other Lust for Gold songs—“1995,” for instance (as in “I never felt more alive than I did in …”) or “YZ80,” about a fondly remembered Yamaha bike his dad gave him. “It’s one of my best memories as a kid—pretty much one of my best memories regardless of my age,” he recalls.

Martin’s wistfulness will come as no surprise to the band’s fans. In the last decade or so, Starflyer 59 albums have become incrementally moodier, as if “Blue Collar Love,” the first song on the group’s now 30-year-old debut, has gradually spread its wings with the ultimate goal of enveloping the band within its diaphanous, melancholy drone. The process approaches a culmination of sorts in Lust for Gold’s reflective tempos, furtive hooks, swirling sonics, and the way that Martin’s ever deepening voice melts into them.

Actually, “process” is too strong a term for what Martin does when he doffs the trucking-company-owner hat that he wears by day and starts making like a Starflyer. Even the occasional familiar echo (the chords of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle,” say, in the new album’s title cut) testifies more to the workings of his subconscious than to a plan.

“Nothing is intentional when I write,” he says. “I’m just putting chord changes together. There’s nothing new under the sun.” As for his lyrics: “Every song is a thought of a moment or a memory in my life. Some of them have more meaning than others.”

One Lust for Gold song with particular meaning is “Everyone Seems Strange,” in which Martin, saddened by an evangelical center that no longer seems to be holding, sings, “The Christians have found their own different ways. / Oh, God, please help me find the ones that stayed.” It’s a rare instance of his using music to directly address his faith.

“My faith in Christ is very important to me,” he says, “but I don’t want to shove the Lord’s name into a song to appear ‘spiritual.’ In a way, to me, that would be taking His name in vain.”