This album drops a matter of weeks before the return of the band that everyone seems to presume are New York City, like, umm period. But while That Other Band rely on the association like an umbilical cord to feed their legend, define their cool, give contextual meaning to the way they walk, blah blah etc, Stellastarr* don’t even seem to have considered the exploitable potential of their immediate geography. Fools, obviously. They might as well hail from New Earswick in York (a real place, incidentally). Well perhaps not quite, but you see what we mean? But there is inspiration in everything – though mostly, y’know, girls, and they’re everywhere – and this is something Shawn Christensen seems to have grasped with minimal difficulty. The key to his particular success though is that he also understands that the most effective way to ram messages of hopeless love home is to tack them to bastard massive pop tunes. Then he enrolled in art college, adding screechingly meticulous, stylized indulgence to his list of attributes, picking up his band and completing the package that delivered this debut.
There are guitars on here that fuzz like they’re going to blow the US Eastern Seaboard’s fuse, and then take responsibility. There are vocals that fizz like the Talking Heads in a Soda Stream, with a double helping of David Byrne ultra-concentrate. There are tunes that if read the dictionary definition of subtlety would shrug, drop their pants and give you the cheeky finger. With only the slightest hint of a blush. It is painfully straightforward and easy to get, but equally heartfelt and subsequently beguiling. It’s the sound of life exploding around its authors in scattered splats of primary colour, calling it art and then setting it alight. Because maybe nothing’s that precious after you’ve already done it once. It’s so vibrant and full of ‘now’ you expect it to pop and be gone forever once ‘Pulp Song’ has disappeared in a screech of tyre tracks and dust.
They pillage the same cupboards as the likes of Hot Hot Heat and Interpol at their opposite ends of the room, take The Cure for the former (the brooding slides of ‘Moongirl’ for instance) and of course Joy Division for the latter (the sharp opener ‘In The Walls’), but it rarely, if ever, presents itself as an early 80s homage nor an add-on to any scene. They do what every band should but rarely achieve, transcending their influences by being themselves. The hugely infectious and rampaging ‘Jenny’ and album high ‘My Coco’ take clippings of choppy Television-esque new-wave pop and drown them in hedonistic overdrive. The aforementioned ‘Pulp Song’ is surely knowingly titled, being a clear rewrite of ‘Common People’ using Cheap Trick’s guitars picked up on eBay. It’s like the line between idea and completion is refreshingly uncluttered. They pose few questions in its creation and you should do the same when engaging with it. Anyway, it’s a hormone overdose and is impossible to resist.