Starsailor

Released in November 1970 on Herb Cohen's Straight Records, the sixth studio album was Buckley's full embrace of avant-garde and jazz-rock. He produced it himself, with Cohen as executive producer and Stan Agol as engineer, and returned to Larry Beckett as lyricist after three albums. Bunk Gardner, a former member of the Mothers of Invention, joined the band, and Buzz Gardner played trumpet and flugelhorn. Trouser Press said it drew on Messiaen, Penderecki and Stockhausen as well as avant-garde jazz, compared its rigorous disorder to Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, and noted that the title track is Buckley alone with fifteen overdubbed tracks of his voice. When Leontyne Price told him she wished composers were writing things like that for opera singers, he answered that she should get her own band.

It failed critically and commercially on release, and the Record Mirror dismissed it as a collection of tuneless wailings and Doctor Who effects. Interest returned after This Mortal Coil's cover of Song to the Siren. Pitchfork placed it at number 50 on its 2004 list of the 100 best albums of the 1970s, it was number 507 in Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums, and the British band Starsailor took its name from the record.