stellastarr* -- stellastarr*

7/10

In 2004, my insomniac ass had a weekday night routine. 10:30-11:30 pm, a combination of Adult Swim and Letterman. 11:30-12:00 pm, Conan. 12:00-12:30 pm, a combination of Conan and Craig Killborn. 12:30-1:00, Craig Killborn. 1:00-Sunrise, basic cable channel-filpping/stare at the ceiling. I may be in the minority, but I really enjoyed Craig Killborn's Late Night show. He had a clear disdain for most of his vapid celebrity guests, reveling in making them play trivia games that often flew far over their heads. His show also had this bizarro late night bachelor vibe that I haven't really seen on any late night show before or since. He just did whatever he felt like and clearly didn't care, evidenced by not renewing his own contract after his first five years ended, getting smashed on his final episode, and allowing Vince Vaughn to destroy his set with a baseball bat. But that's a tangent. Something had to fill that timeslot for me, and that thing ended up being...Carson Daly?
Yes, the man who tormented me with his awful countdown show in my senior year of high school had his own late night show on NBC...really late night. But wasn't Carson Daly a terrible man with a terrible taste in music? His Total Request Live featured N'Sync, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys...the kind of stuff that made me want to jump off the Mississippi River bridge. Still, I did remember hearing him say one time, after Rage Against the Machine broke up, "At least we still have Deftones." That struck me as strange because...Deftones are actually good. Like, they're one of my favorite bands good (of course, if I, The Nicsperiment like something, it is truly, unquestionably excellent). Turns out all that crap on Total Request Live was just stuff Daly had to MC for, and that he actually had no interest in...because his late night show was essentially a showcase for live bands that he liked. And boy did he like some good ones. I saw some great bands play on Carson Daly's late night show. He had the aforementioned Deftones, but he also showcased bands I had never heard before, like TV on the Radio and stellastarr*. 
stellastarr* (that's how they stylized it, folks) immediately interested me because they had a girl in their band. Please let this girl sing I thought. The girl did sing...not lead, but she did sing. Her backup vocals, and particularly her bass-playing sounded great. The whole band sounded grat. They played a style of music the early to mid-00's seemed to feature a bit of a revival of: some would call it new wave or "post-punk," but I thought of it more as Joy Division-worship with vocalists who could actually sing. It's cool, I hung out with Ian Curtis' ghost once, and he said I could make both these jokes.
Interpol led the charge, and by lead the charge, I mean they released likely the only truly classic album to come from this movement, 2002's absolutely phenomenal Turn On the Bright Lights. Plenty of other bands tried to do something else as lasting, even Interpol, but they all came up short. Some decent albums came out of this movement, though, and a couple of them came from (where else in the world) New York City-based stellastarr*.
On their self-titled debut, stellastarr* don't break the mold of dancey drums, strum-strum, chorus-effected, sometimes arpeggiated, delay-soaked guitars, driving basslines and...a certain type of affected vocal style, but they just do it so well. For instance, the song they performed on Daly's show, "In the Walls," which was enough to get me to purchase this self-titled debut, is an absolute banger--atmospheric, pulsing, and mysterious. I remember saying to my friends one late summer night in my car, after asking them if they wouldn't mind me playing this song twice, "Why does it always feel like winter, even in the summer." What an emo.

But thankfully, the album isn't just one good track and a bunch of filler. "Jenny" keeps the party going, a fun track with a killer outro, led into by the almost addictive refrain of "Jenny's coming after you-you, you you!" The band are able to mix it up throughout the next eight tracks, with some softer, more ballad-leaning songs, and even a jammy, near-six-minute near-instrumental, the Cure-influenced "Moongirl." All this 2004 talk is making me want to lie around in bed watching Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson movies, thinking about how Friends and Angel just ended. Anyway, admittedly, the band's vocal stylings can get a bit monotonous, but stellastarr* never quite wears out its welcome. Most importantly, the album is fun without feeling like some sort of pandering, commercially calculated dreck. These four kids clearly have their influences, but they're still creating something good together for what seems like the act of pure enjoyment. That's still tangible 17 years later. Thanks, Carson Daly.

2003 RCA
1. In the Walls 3:49
2. Jenny 4:16
3. A Million Reasons 4:19
4. My Coco 5:05
5. No Weather 3:15
6. Moongirl 5:30
7. Somewhere Across Forever 3:40
8. Homeland 3:55
9. Untitled 5:07
10. Pulp Song 3:39