future farmer recordings

Written by Jon Rooney.

In the late 90’s and early 00’s, For Stars released four full-length CDs on small West Coast indie Future Farmer Recordings, whose claim to fame is surely the introduction of M. Ward to the world years before Merge and his ingénue duets, as well as one EP of outtakes on the impossibly fertile Spanish label Acuarela Discos. Bay Area-based For Stars made very sad, very clear and staggeringly sparse music marked by leader Carlos Forster’s soaring falsetto and vaguely Beach Boys-esque melodies. His songs were about loss, longing, aging, and decay in the simplest, most direct terms. Never resorting to decorate his lyrics with clever artifice or cloudy metaphysics, Forster instead charged forward with sentiments so honest and unselfconscious that they could be, and were, easily overlooked (see Pitchfork’s shitty review of the band’s final release, …It Falls Apart). For a band with five members, the song arrangements were roomy, mellow and, above all, pretty – jazz brushes on a snare, an old synth mixed low, a stranded electric guitar playing single-string lead lines, the like. For Stars based an entire aesthetic around the kind of lovelorn magic captured so famously in REM’s “Nightswimming”; a sense of post-adolescent heartache and loneliness that should have made them the thinking and feeling person’s musical bookend to the Mountain Goats. Read More »For Stars [Feature]