TEST

I drafted a few deep, philosophical analogies to lead us into this review, but I scrapped them all. The Murmur isn’t about the clever wordplay or fancy sentence structure that typical Bike intros normally traffic in. The Murmur is about riding your damn bike. It’s unapologetically minimalist in its design and has as many pivots as characters that make up the punctuation at the end of this sentence. But don’t let that deceive you. The Murmur is simple, but not simplistic—in fact, its ride is more complex and nuanced than that of most bikes.

Its manufacturer, Starling Cycles, is a small operation based out of Bristol, England, run by engineer-turned-framebuilder Joe McEwan. Starling offers four models, including two trail/enduro bikes, a singlespeed jack drive DH rig and a snazzy mullet build. In a word—niche. But on the same token,