Shimmering Stars are a trio from British Columbia who certainly have the sounds of the past down pat. The band was founded after its figurehead, guitarist Rory McClure, binged on old performance footage of the Everly Brothers. The swaying melodies and dippy, falsetto-speckled vocals on the band's debut LP, Violent Hearts, are the marks of that influence. But as the title suggests, though, this stuff veers from swooning romanticism. They make pleas for self-medication and express vague emotional confusion throughout. One of the album's most optimistic songs, "I'm Gonna Try", begins: "Walking down the street/ And I wanna kill everyone I meet." Later, when Shimmering Stars complain about "Dancing to Music I Hate", it seems like a comparatively uncomplicated personal problem.
Like a lot of young bands lately, Shimmering Stars' affectations can be easily traced back to Deerhunter, another group that filters experience through sounds and textures plucked from music's past. And if Shimmering Stars don't quite reach the same level of noisy euphoria anywhere on Violent Hearts, the surprising consistency of the record as a whole-- if you're a sucker for one song on here, you're a sucker for all of 'em-- is more than enough to make up for any lack of assertiveness.
As a full-length listening experience, Violent Hearts is a little much-- it runs just under a lean half-hour, but the relative lack of stylistic breadth covered makes a front-to-back spin feel longer. Another issue is the production value; Violent Hearts was self-recorded by McClure in his parents' garage (cheekily referred to in the album's liner notes as "The Garage Mahal"). While the homespun charm adds some ghostly distance to these songs, it's frustrating to imagine what they would sound like with some better mics (and maybe a real recording studio, too). There's no shortage of emotional bloodshed here, but any horror geek will tell you that blood just doesn't look as good in black-and-white.
