Planet Painkiller review - The Express (Jan 28th 2000)
"If dark and sombre is your thing, if you're one of those people who think smiling is just so last century, you'll love this. Self-written, played and recorded, Chris Starling's debut LP is a beautiful thing. Largely acoustic songs, properly sung, properly played. And fantastically bleak. But, you know, there's a difference between bleak and hopeless. Follow bleak to its conclusion and you find a delicate hope. That's Planet Painkiller's secret."
Planet Painkiller review - The Independent (Jan 28th 2000)
"The first solo effort from the former frontman of The Starlings (no, they passed me by too) features an engaging blend of sly, allusive songs set to modern beats, one of the more interesting recent collusions of classic song structure with sampling technology. At his best - tracks such as 'Bobby Slaughter Saw The Light', a tale of failure and suicide delivered with a surprising lightness of tone - Starling brings the warmth and textural feel of Jim O'Rourke's Eurekato the vignette song style of someone like Shawn Mullins, although Starling's tablaux are less direct than that suggests, and more open to experiment. 'Saved Up', for instance, piles up cliches familiar from story narratives - blown cover, spilt beans, broken hearts, etc - but the cumulative effect is less of a specific plot than the general condition of story telling. The sultry 'Rawhide Baby', likewise, is little more than a series of erotic urges - 'love to please, love to squeeze, love to choke, love to stroke', etc - set to a slinky groove. Throughout, dark undercurrents stain the songs with menace and mystery, most impressively on 'Mouths & Brains', an acid blues in which a cuckold threatens to 'start forgetting what mouths and brains are for'." - Andy Gill
Planet Painkiller - The Observer (23rd Jan 2000)
"Starling was a teen star in his native New Zealand before moving to Britain to front The Starlings, a band who post-grunge sound found few takers. Burnt by a drug habit, Starling removed to the West Country, whence comes this reflective semi-acoustic solo set. It presents a bruised survivor's view of the world, mixing cameos of low life losers with aching appreciations of beauty and love, in which some shimmering production nicely sets off Starling's mellow vocals."
Planet Painkiller review - The Times (Jan 2000)
"Suffering from major label burn-out, Chris Starling, former frontman with Starlings, retreated to Devon where he wrote all the songs on this solo outing. Starlings released a brace of albums in the mid-Nineties that mined their Kiwi songwriter's scathing cynicism but, while Planet Painkiller finds its creator more relaxed, there's still time to contemplate mass murder (Charles Mantra Overboard) and self-loathing (Bonehead). There's a breezy swing to the best songs, with Starling's voice recalling Art Garfunkel, particularly on Saved Up, The Word and Clouds, whose lyrics reflect his former taste for that most addictive analgesic, heroin: "In the clouds I can sleep, all I want is to block out the past." Planet Painkiller sounds deceptively lightweight but read the label carefully." - Mike Pattenden
Planet Painkiller review - The Big Issue, No. 369, January 17-23, 2000
"The Starlings in case you (very likely) didn't know were around in the early Nineties and they were very dark. Now former Starlings frontman Chris Starling is going it alone. This a very solo, songwritery, modern pop record mixing rock, country, miscellaneous electronics and some other shit. The end results are always decent and sometimes excellent, with Chris' knack for bleakly amusing choruses really shining through."
Planet Painkiller review - NME (22nd January 2000)
"It's an old cliché but eyes really are the windows of the soul. They can tell tales more powerfully than any mouth, love and hate as fiercely as any gesture. So, after all this time, it's somehow fitting that Chris Starling has chosen a close-up photo of one of his eyes for the cover of his solo album. It's an invitation in, proof he's got nothing to hide now.
Chris, you see, has been around. A teen star in his native New Zealand, a touring musician with everyone from Sisters Of Mercy to, erm, Babylon Zoo and , most notably, the frontman of herion-fuelled angry young men, The Starlings. Their failure to set the world alight led Chris to disappear to Devon and, while figuring out what to do with his life and getting over the drugs, he came up with this.
'Planet Painkiller' is certainly a reflection of the circumstances from which it was born. Quiet and intensely intimate, the twisted fury of The Starlings has been replaced by a more subdued reflection. Chris is older and probably wiser but he still uses music to purge his demons. And, bizarrely, it's even more listenable now it doesn't feel quite so life-or-death.
That's largely thanks to his softly laid-back vocals. Somewhere between a mellow Lou Reed and a wistful Bob Dylan, Chris is unhurried and almost deadly in his softness. It comes as no surprise, then, to realise how many of these acoustic-based songs skirt around the subjects of suicide, murder and deception. 'Planet Painkiller' has clearly been inspired by a bleak vision of the world but, perhaps thanks to that time in Devon, it somehow ends up sounding surprisingly positive. In the charmingly simple 'Bobby Slaughter Saw The Light', for instance, suicide is embraced as a welcome escape. Elsewhere, through the gorgeous strains of harmonica in 'The Word' and the barely-there beauty of 'Tender', a glimmer of hope shines through.
In fact, Chris could no doubt manage without the music to help him get by now. But let's hope he doesn't want to." - Siobhan Grogan
Planet Painkiller review - Uncut (March 2000)
"Excellent comeback from ex-member of The Starlings and The Exponents. As the central force behind The Starlings, New Zealand-born Chris Sheehan greeted the start of the Nineties with two of the most vitriolic albums ever made about heroin and the music business. His re-emergence six years later (as Chris Starling) finally gives him the chance to reveal the lighter side of his character. Self-recorded in a Devon hideaway, "Planet Painkiller" is the best - and most contented record - he's ever made. The skeletal beats and battered guitar effects of "Rawhide Baby" and "The Word" see him offering a fractured, deftly melodic take on Odelay-era Beck. And the album as a whole offers a timely reminder of a man who's immense talent has yet to be fully recognised." - James Oldham
Planet Painkiller review - Q magazine (March 2000)
Striking homemade solo debut of cultish smack-rock Starlings' former frontman.
An exiled Kiwi now living in Devon, Chris Starling remains one of rock's more interesting peripheral figures. A teen star in his homeland, he relocated to London, acquired a heroin habit and then proceeded to sing about it in brutal detail on 1994's Too Many Dogs. After odd jobs with Belinda Carlisle and Sisters Of Mercy, he is currently making the best music of his life, the aptly named Tender even betraying stirrings of a softer kind. Released on his own label, the album is entirely his own work. A vanity piece, however, it isn't. Instead, try imagining Green Gartside fronting The Jesus & Mary Chain with some atmospheric programming and noir-ish undertow. Rawhide Baby, Charles Mantra Overboard and the banjo-riffing Mouths & Brains particularly hit the spot." - Peter Kane
Planet Painkiller review - Top (Feb 2000)
"Chris Starling is another miserablist - someone who is so low he doesn't even know what ground level looks like. Years earlier this New Zealander used to be in The Starlings, a magnificently brooding outlet whose two albums, '92's Valid and '94's Too Many Dogs, offered the kind of musical nightmares that would give Nick Cave the chills. Now solo, he's back on inimitably ghoulish form with Planet Painkiller, which he hysterically describes as "more optimistic, a happier record." Really? Well let's examine the evidence. A quick perusal of the lyric sheet throws up many an "optimistic" rhyming couplet, such as "Love to please, love to squeeze, love to choke", or "Bobby used the last of his powder to help get to sleep when the traffic got louder", and, from 'Charles Mantra Overboard', "Maybe I should've killed four or five hundred people, then I would've felt better." The melodies, meanwhile, aren't exactly Steps. They sound either funereal or in the process of shooting up. This is music from the dark side, made for people in touch with a dark side. It's the sound of the lights out and an irregular heartbeat and, albeit gloomy, it's rather ace." - Nick Duerden
Planet Painkiller review - Amazon.co.uk
"Chris was formerly of The Starlings, who produced two bleak 1990s classics in Valid and Too Many Dogs. Their commercial failure, however, seems to have dispatched Starling into a pit of depression. Planet Painkiller sees him emerge with an album which he himself regards as "optimistic", though there are some pretty dark clouds attached to its silver linings. "Rawhide Baby" sets the tone. Musically, we're in Marlboro Country--big, parched and reverberating ominously with Duane Eddy-style guitar chords and rattlesnake rhythms. The obsessive note struck by this lustful ditty is reprised on "Charles Mantra Overboard", which samples a would-be Manson-style murderer's rant against humanity and "Bonehead", whose lyrics simply repeat the title over and over, a misanthropic mantra. But then there's a real sense of redemption and cleansing on "Bobby Slaughter Saw The Light", "The Word" and especially "Clouds", whose levitating chords are reminiscent of the Byrds. This album takes you to down to some pitch-black places, but ultimately it manages to rescue you from them." - David Stubbs
Planet Painkiller review - audiostreet.com
"Chris Starling is a singer-songwriter formerly of indie angst-merchants The Starlings and has for the most of his adult playing life been writing and performing music. After achieving no major success with The Starlings, he continued to play with various other bands including Sisters of Mercy and Curve. This is his first solo album, which he recorded himself and put out on his own label.
Starling sings like a more restrained Lou Reed and Planet Painkiller is a melodic, evocative album reminiscent of Bob Dylan at his best. The recurrent themes running through Starling's music are loneliness, murder and suicide, but fear not, a certain lightness and positivity manages to shine through his gently-strummed, tuneful songs. Highlights include The Word and Tender - both gorgeous, lilting tunes which sound like a cross between Dylan and a gentler, less acerbic Oasis... An unexpected delight."
Planet Painkiller review - Music365.com (Feb 10th 2000)
Very decent set of songs from exiled Kiwi...
"Chris Starling (neé Sheehan) has lived a bit. A real live pop star in his native New Zealand back in the '80s (backed by some of the greatest masters of rhythm the Antipodes could boast), washed up and strung out in London a few years later, he was signed to Dave Stewart's 'kiss of death' label, Anxious, and apparently worked as a back-up musician to some distinguished one hit wonders. Strangely this is his first solo album, the label named after the postcode of his Devon retreat, where he now lives with his music and his guns. Not that that last fact should influence anyone's opinions.
Though 'Planet Painkiller', almost entirely played and produced by Starling, is in effect little more than a superior set of demos, the sound is surprisingly warm and effective. The loops and rotating riffs seem so comfortable, one has to wonder what he'd come up with given, say, an Oasis-level recording budget. The excellent 'Mouths and Brains' wobbles along like one time labelmates Curve with a banjo and a sense of fun, 'Saved Up' brings Latin lo-fi to the world and Starling cribs his lead guitar from the same Isley Brothers record as Edwyn Collins on 'Clouds'. And there's a tribute to a long forgotten star on the eloquent 'Bonehead' (lyrics consisting of the title twenty one times - very appropriate). Certainly a cut above the work of overrated fellow misanthrope Luke Haines, and leavened with humour and a serious understanding of tradition, this record deserves a wider hearing." - Steve Jelbert
