Album Review: Stars Like Ours - "Stars Like Ours"

 

Another offering from the always reliable Rum Bar records stable, Stars Like Ours are a trio from the label's home town of Boston who are, as you'd expect, a pop-punk group but definitely leaning towards the more muscular end of the genre.

Over the nine tracks and 30-odd minute here, they serve up an enjoyable offering which sounds like one part Celebrity Skin era Hole and one part 1977 era Ash, all chugging guitars, purred angst and with enough skyscraping choruses and soaring riffs to stand out from the crowd. While lead singer Michelle's vocals are pure Courtney style snarl, it's the more melodic approach that Stars Like Ours take to things which helps them stand out with the likes of the anthemic Radio, the stratospheric All Too Often and the chugging Lines being particular standouts which you could just imagine Tim Wheeler penning back in the day while Love In A Parking Lot is pure simmering tension. Throughout the trio, completed by guitarist Kristin and drummer Eric, keep things suitably tight to ensure that the tunes grab you right from the off and don't let go. 

It's always good to come across a new band offering something a bit different from the usual stuff that lands in the Nite Songs inbox and, while they're treading fairly familiar ground, Stars Like Ours deserve a lot of credit for taking a tried and tested formula and doing something with it that's different from a lot of their peers. Any Donnas, Wildhearts or Mysterines fans looking for a new band to get behind could do a lot worse than give this lot a try.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sounds From The Junkshop #18 - Heavy Stereo

Image
  "So here's to a happy landing, wherever we're fallin' to..."  - Heavy Stereo  - Cartoon Moon , 1996 Let's be honest, it all started to go wrong for Oasis when they started to swallow the "new Beatles" hype wholesale. Well that and when they started developing a worrying predilection for tedious blues jams but that's a whole other story. I blame Paul Weller meself. The thing about Definitely Maybe was, y'see, yes there was definitely a Beatles influence there (I mean on the likes of Live Forever and Up In The Sky you can't really miss it) but there was so much more going on there as well. On that one, the Gallaghers owed arguably more to the '70s glam stomp of T-Rex and Slade ( Cigarettes and Alcohol for the former, Rock 'n' Roll Star for the latter) or the scuzzy sneer of the Pistols ( Bring It On Down ) than they did to the Fab Four. Their critics may have derided them as such but a Lennon & McCartney tribute band ...
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure, ...
Read more

Sounds From The Junkshop #46 - Bis

Image
  "If it's not worth pretending then I don't wanna know..."  - Bis   - Eurodisco There's an argument that we should possibly have covered Bis a bit earlier in SFTJ some time around the entries for 1996 or so rather than now as we enter 1999 as this was when they had their biggest success and their five minutes of infamy. Bursting on the scene just as Britpop was at its peak, their none more lo-fi aesthetic which harked back to a decade before brought them plaudits and derision in pretty much equal amounts. I remember my younger sister absolutely loved them and I ended up borrowing her copy of the group's debut album New Transistor Heroes  mainly just to see what the fuss was about. Although it wasn't deserving of some of the scathing reviews it got, I thought it was good but not brilliant. Certainly Bis were very much a Marmite band with the keyboard bleeps, wannabe-cutesy lyrics about sweetshops etc and screechy vocals putting a lot of people off but in a...
Read more