Year: 2007
Time: 38:25
Size: 88,3 MB
Label: Drag City
Styles: Rock/Psychedelic Rock
Art: Front
Tracks Listing:
1. No More - 2:19
2. Half Centered Half Sane - 2:47
3. Portable Freak Factory - 3:15
4. My People - 8:53
5. East to West - 5:19
6. Can't End Today - 3:04
7. Hercules - 3:01
8. Mirror/Messenger - 9:45
Major Stars is a critically acclaimed American psychedelic rock band from greater Boston, Massachusetts.
Playing in a modern psych-rock band is, in many ways, like being a guitar-toting Live Action role-player-- reliving 1969 not as it was, but as we feel it should have been. The genre can be a playground of vintage instrument-wielding longhairs clad in period frock-- if you're at a Mammatus or Acid Mothers Temple show you might even see a wizard cloak or two.
Boston's Major Stars, however, have a pretty unique voice for a psych-rock band, but it's kind of hard to hear it on their latest album, Mirror/Messenger. On 2005's 4 Major Stars guitarists Wayne Rodgers and Kate Biggar labored under the pretense of verse and chorus only for as long as it took somebody to drop a lead foot on the wah-wah pedal and send the band choogling off into shred-oblivion. But Mirror/Messenger revels in fuzzy freak-outs-- it's pleasantly free of retro-stoner affectations and heavy on punk-inspired edge.
Mirror/Messenger therefore finds Major Stars at their most accessible-- there are verses, choruses, and only a few songs that stray over the four-minute mark. The record's best moments, like the laid back "East to West", are loud and heavy, but sound familiar to anybody who's listened to Dinosaur Jr. Rodgers has wisely ceded vocal duties to Sandra Barrett and, while her classic rock tenor is more than a little reminiscent of Heart's Ann Wilson, it's a step forward from Rogers, whose dull growl recalled a despondent Dave Grohl. Meanwhile Rogers is left free to join fellow guitarists Kate Biggar and Tom Leonard (who handed bass duties off to Dave Dougan) in kicking up a larger and wilder noise-- so much noise in fact, that it's hard to fit anything else comfortably on the record.
The three-guitar approach allows everything on Mirror/Messenger to sound thrillingly heavy. The album's title track and closer fits a guitar into every spare inch of space-- there's always somebody with a spare limb to jimmy the wah-wah pedal up and down, bend notes, and pummel strings into dust. As a result the rhythm section winds up buried. On "Portable Freak Factory" Casey Keenan's drums crumble into a dull racket as soon as the song's chugging core riff vanishes. Meanwhile, the only way to shoehorn in Barrett's vocals is to dial them way up into the mix, making her sound awkwardly and disproportionately present. On "No More" she comes across like an afterthought-- unnaturally Frankensteined over the top of an otherwise tight instrumental jam.
Plenty of good psych records have sounded bad in the past; indeed many of them even made a virtue out of sounding bad. Nobody bought a Mainliner record for clarity (although, nobody really bought them in the first place). But Mirror/Messenger deserves better than that. For the first time in Major Stars' career they've produced a set of structurally tight compositions that stand out stylistically among their peers-- songs that deserve to be heard with some sort of clarity. But as it is, Mirror/Messenger doesn't cut through the din.
Mirror/Messenger
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