Lawrence.com

Band bio:The Starlight Mints - 'the band that's been sleeping in your head' - has returned to our collective consciousness with the fantastic musical mosaic of Built on Squares. The album's warm and playful sense of innocence - with a somber darkness beneath the surface - connects the components of pop history and personal life.The warped psychedelic bubble-gum pop of the Norman, OK group's Y2K debut album The Dream That Stuff Was Made Of remains as fun as ever. But, Built on Squares delves deeper into the emotions, as well as adding flavors of chamber pop, antique Americana and Britpop to its charmingly seductive and addictive allure.All great pop songs are 'built on squares.' That is, a pop song is a mosaic of its era, built upon pieces of the past that resonate with the same familiar episodes of the human condition - love, hope, despair, etc. Somehow, when a new song is really at its best, it sounds like a song you've heard for all of your life. From the first strains of "Black Cat Detector" onward throughout the lush and evocative 12-song album, Built on Squares is a playful mix of heartfelt honesty and longing tunes that sound like they've been with us forever; strangely familiar, yet uniquely new.Listening to Built on Squares is like tracing the mortared veins between bricks in that musical wall - the songs seem to merge nursery rhymes, teenage anthems and grown-up pomp in bittersweet landscapes. The sinister swing of the Cure's poppier moments connecting to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers; Scary Monsters-era Bowie attached to the Latin American psych of Os Mutantes; the looping psychedelic swoon of XTC stacked on top of the Monkees. The Starlight Mints create a timeless sway of the senses.Singer/guitarist and principal songwriter Allan Vest writes would-be radio-ready tunes for a more perfect world. Like such quirky, catchy hit-makers as Robyn Hitchcock, Jonathan Richman, Ray Davies and Robert Smith, Vest's wry sense of humor brings charming warmth to his songs. "I'm baffled by the record, " Vest laughs. "It actually became a much more complicated process recording much of the album on a computer, but the songs themselves are more heartfelt and genuine than before."Although the band tours as a five-piece, the core of the group is Vest along with co-founder, drummer and multi-instrumentalist Andy Nunez and keyboardist/backing-vocalist Marian Love-Nunez. The integral trio arranged and recorded the album in their hometown with engineer Trent Bell, who also recorded the band's debut. Various friends lent their talents on sweeping strings, blaring horns and honkey tonk piano, giving the album its layered and anachronistic essence. "I love oldies, I love strange cartoon music," Vest says. "We don't ever set out to sound deliberately odd, but something in our chemistry just makes it that way."A perky cello and violin minuet opens the album as a cool swinging drum beat and bass line punctuate the melody of "Black Cat Detector." Stomping bar-chords nudge everything forward as Vest sings with telling suspicion, "switchblade stuck in the moon / Is that the little girl inside of you?" The ominous melody of "Pages" sounds reminiscent of Disintegration-era Cure as Vest's eager voice crawls across pizzicato strings, muted guitar notes, a repetitious toy piano and backing vocals cast adrift from Sergio Mendez and Brazil '66. "Brass Digger" begins with a stately Spanish trumpet line that leaps into a Dylan-esque harmonica and strummed acoustic guitar melody, while Vest croons as if he's got a mile-wide smile, "have you ever lost your mind in a satellite sky?"Love, anger, fear, joy, sorrow and hope...all at once, come to your senses.