Rock has undisputedly been struggling in the past ten years to maintain the relevant influence it had over pop culture for so many decades, but if it’s going to make a grand comeback in the 2020s, it’s going to need a lot of help from bands like Starfire. Starfire’s new album Dreaming of Your Destiny is one built on the cornerstones of classic rock bombast, but this isn’t to say that the record is devoid of the original touch that makes a fresh release so provocative to begin with. If anything, this is a work cut too closely from the ancient lineage of rock to lack such an originality, and it’s definitely obvious from the start how unique a love for this medium these players have.
The bassline is a beast of a component in “Get Up and Move,” “Owner of This Heart,” and “Everybody Plays the Fool,” and this was important in these three songs as they need a bit of solid ground from which to launch their epic harmonies. If there’s one thing this band has going for them that a lot of others in rock don’t, it’s their comradery as musicians, which bleeds into whatever they’re playing and makes the cohesiveness of the material impossible to ignore.
Our singer is never giving us a passive lyrical effort at the helm of songs like “Into the Night,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” and “Get Ready (Here I Come),” but instead throwing as much of himself into the music as is possible to do from within the confines of a studio. Clearly, nothing will live up to the standard that a band like this one has when they’re owning the stage in person, but for all intents and purposes, this album is a terrific example of their precision from within the context of its recording.
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As previously stated, the chemistry between these artists is something to marvel at by itself in Dreaming of Your Destiny, and it produces such an emotional centerpiece for “This Wonderful Moment,” “Do You Dare,” “I Can’t Deny,” and “I Can’t Sleep” that there’s never any room for arguing over the level of respect for intricacy each one of the players in this mix has. They’ve got something in common with the greater narrative at hand in this album and were that not the case I don’t think they would be affording us the passion they are from one piece to the next here.
I was not aware of the music Starfire was making before getting into Dreaming of Your Destiny, but as their ambitiousness alone takes so much of the material they’ve recorded in this effort to the next level, I would be doing listeners a disservice to not recommend it this February. Starfire isn’t doing anything that hasn’t already been done in rock a number of times before by legendary acts from one side of the pond to the other; it’s the moodiness of their melodies that makes them such a special outfit next to the competition.
Claire Uebelacker