Album Review: Trevor Sensor’s Starved Nights of Saturday Stars is the Catcher and The Rye of EP’s
Trevor Sensor’s Starved Nights of Saturday Stars is the Catcher and The Rye of EP’s. It plays like the mind of Holden Caufield as he battles physical, mental, and emotional chaos just to get through another night in his humdrum life. Sensor has created the millennial version of the “beat generations” confessional stylings. It is raw and incredibly intriguing to delve into the life of a lonely, self-deprecating, sexually frustrated, and life-challenged, young man.
Sensor was an English major with a distinct liking for Marcel Proust, and his poetical lyrics reveal the immense respect he has for this literary figure. The EP is fascinatingly fractured in its blunt abrasion of the soul. Sensor vocally sounds like Bob Dylan on an emotional edge. He is torn, tired, and tinkering on insanity. Personally, I love it. As the banjos play or the synth beats arise, you follow the folksily blue Sensor because you have been him. His approach to the sinfulness and spiritual challenges one must face with themselves is absolutely honest. In just three tracks he leaves you salivating for more because no one speaks so poignantly on their inner darkness quite like him. Thus, Sensor’s lack of censorship enters you like a giant glass of clear, crisp water. You are thankful that your spiritual thirst has been quenched because you never had the strength to face it.
When Tammy Spoke To Martha
When it comes to his songwriting approach Sensor claims, “If I’m trying to do anything, it’s to be sincere. A lot of singer/songwriters today are oriented in irony. It’s cooler to be lackadaisical rather than to try to be compelling.” Well, compelling he truly is! You cannot avoid wanting to go through his ruckus of a journey and listen to his wrought insecurities and “bad” behavior. It is as if Sensor has written down every moment a human being was hard on themselves into his EP.
Track By Track Review:
When Tammy Spoke To Martha: the song feels like an old-school rock song that was a hidden track in the local jukebox. The guitar and drums are playful, while Sensor sings like a coolly, deranged Elvis.
Starved Nights of Saturday Stars: this song feels like the anti- version of Billy Joel’s Piano Man. It constructs anarchism into its instrumentals as Sensor sings the song like a drunk man emotionally venting. The lyrics are writhing in sentiments of boredom with “everyday life” and readiness to be full through a night with a woman.
Another Night At Lamppost Lounge: A synthetic noir into the night of a young man mentally over the “sameness” of his life. We all wonder what “more” is there to life, especially when we find that routine is a paradox between comfortable and miserable. Sensor talks over the mellowing rhythms like a man being secretly recorded reading his diary aloud. It is a fantastic song.
Starved Nights of Saturday Stars comes out on Jagjaguwar Records on August 5. Click here to buy the album and for more information on Trevor Sensor.
