Star 99 – Gaman | Album Review
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Lauren Records
I have pretty lofty ambitions for my life, but if you asked how I plan to accomplish them, I wouldn’t have a clue what to tell you. I actually don’t know how to make a plan, to tell the truth. If I don’t have an external stimulus pushing me toward a goal, I’ll stay motionless and stagnant. I’ve sat on a health scare for two years because I think I can make my appointment tomorrow. The fact that I moved across the country has nothing to do with my long-standing desire to live in New York; instead, my life here is owed to my driven girlfriend. The first time I read Conversations With Friends, I put in my Goodreads review how much I identified with the apathetic Francis. When I started rereading it, I hoped I’d prove that read to be foolish, but when I got to the end, I just felt ashamed of how much more like her I was after four years. No, I don’t like that about myself either.
The lyrics on Gaman, Star 99’s sophomore album, aren’t that self-disparaging, but the sense of longing for love and hope for a better future they evoke is apt for someone in their mid-20s to belt along to while driving through a suburban town they dare to dream of escaping. That’s how I felt driving through my Kansas suburb, screaming along to Sunchokes, a clear Gaman antecedent that I had on repeat after I moved home in the wake of COVID. Lest you think I’m being dramatic, it’s all in the title. Gaman, the term, comes from Zen Buddhism and refers to enduring the worst with dignity. Gaman, the album, encapsulates the feeling of discontent I get from The Worst Person in the World; unbearable dissonance between external expectations and your internal world. This isn’t new ground for the band; after all, their debut, Bitch Unlimited, did have the lyric “but I don’t know how to talk to / people that buy houses.”
The first time I heard the lead single “Kill,” my brain instantly connected the track with the opening sequence of Legally Blonde. Something about the melody or that opening line sparked a connection with the brilliant decision to pair a montage of Elle Woods with Hoku’s perfectly ironic “Perfect Day.” The character of Elle Woods is even fit for a Star 99 song, as she is determined to make her own place within a structure that doesn’t want her.
The most I ever felt disconnected was during my freshman year of college. I’d decided to go to the community college, a 20-minute suburban drive from my parents’ house, in the midst of struggling with my assigned gender, while all my closest friends went to state schools together and made fun of my fake college experience. The only one who I felt like loved me unconditionally during that time was my dog, Stevie. When I hear “Brother,” I’m filled with that desperation again in the chorus recounting commonly aired ads “for work injury lawsuits / turn cash into gold.” At the time, I was terrified of turning into the “hometown beauty now that everyone’s gone,” as described in “Emails.”
A lot of those friends are back home now with mortgages and spouses. I know that lifestyle would never work for me, but I still feel uncertain when I consider the fact that they spend less a month to own their home than I do renting my closet of an apartment. That’s why my favorite lyric from the album is on the song “Pacemakers,” the simple and efficient cry, “I don’t know how to be happy, I just / know how to make it work.”
I’ve thought all my life that escaping home would be enough, but making peace with yourself is an everyday struggle that requires hope you’ll do it right and grace to accept you’ll fuck it up sometimes. That acceptance is all over Gaman, most notably in the beautiful chorus on track two: “Every time we go to bat / we perpetuate ourselves / again and again.” It’s a beautiful reminder that we’re all just like “trees trying to be a forest because / that’s all they know,” it’s only natural to feel discontent when we fail to make our forest.
Gaman isn’t just wallowing though, these songs are fucking fun. “Pushing Daisies” charges forward like the best pushpit starter and then dips into a tension-building bridge as Thomas Calvo repeats “If calling back is too hard,” before launching back into the roiling verse. “Gray Wall” may have some of the most nostalgic lyrics, but the trip-hop drums, harmonica, and acoustic guitar refuse to be mournful of what’s past.
What makes all the unbearable mental turmoil worth it, when “they won’t build statues of me” and when “my life won’t be biographied,” is those small moments. That love between a girl and her dog. Seeing a pack of cigarettes that makes you remember those quiet moments smoking with someone who’s not around anymore. Biking to a friend’s house without telling anyone where you’re going. Put more simply, “But I love you so much, and I am so lucky.”
Lillian Weber is a fake librarian in NYC. She writes about gender, music, and other inane thoughts on her substack, all my selves aligned. You can follow her on Instagram and Bluesky @lillianmweber
