Album Review: Starcrawler - "She Said"

 

It's safe to say I was a bit late to the party with Starcrawler, in fact it was only earlier this year that I first encountered their debut album after a friend recommended it to me. Suffice to say I was kicking myself for missing it first time out, it's genuinely one of the strongest opening shots I've heard for a fair few years, sounding as if someone had taken all the best bits of Queen Adreena, Silverfish, Curve, the Nymphs and the Mysterines and thrown them in a big melting pot to create something genuinely special.

Well, four years on and here we are for Starcrawler album number three, their first on a major label and, maybe unsurprisingly, the sound has been refined a bit with a more mainstream pop-punk sound coming to the fore. But happily, most of the time it works pretty well and there's some good slices of feral angst on here with the hooks to keep you listening on repeat (Roadkill, Stranded, Broken Angels, True). If anything they sound a bit like the Distillers circa Coral Fang on this album which is no bad thing. There's only two slight bugbears here - firstly, there are a couple of occasions, namely the title track and Jetblack where it kind of feels a bit too scrubbed and that Starcrawler have lost a bit of the mystique of old. Thankfully though these are very much in a minority here.

The second issue is that She Said feels as if it's missing the weirdness which was the main selling point of the first two Starcrawler albums - it's still good but I just wish we had something like the lurching Cramps-style uneasiness of Chicken Woman or the low-slung defiance of What I Want on here. There are two genuine standout moments though in the sinister stripped back acoustics of Midnight and the haunting country lament that is Better Place which shows that they're still capable of going outside the box even if they're not quite doing it as much as they used to.

Starcrawler have literally come a whisker away from delivering a great album here and make no mistake, She Said is still a good effort and it certainly won't disappoint you but I just feel like this band can do ever so slightly better. Hopefully now that they've got their feet under the table with their new paymasters they can use a bit of leverage to push things a bit harder on their next album.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)