Well, isn't this just great. The Chinese Stars are now a "dude" Erase Errata. Much like their West Coast counterpart, the Providence band has put together a full-length album with nine attempts at playing the same goddamn song. All the tempos are exactly the same, there's a token noisy guitar riff that introduces every track and then sticks with it throughout, and singer Eric Paul consistently rattles off crackpipe lyrics about body parts, bugs and machines. And, save some occasional breaks, there's more fucking swishy hi-hat than anyone could possibly tolerate. Erase Errata's a lost cause, but who told this promising Providence band to start parodying themselves, too?
It's a shame. The quartet, constituted of ex-Arab on Radar and Six Finger Satellite members, managed remarkable variety on their debut Turbo Mattress EP, and with perplexing second nature-- it was as if The Chinese Stars had no idea they had dancepunk tendencies. The slow-in-muck bursts of guitar noise on "The Fastest Horse Yet", the hyper-intelligent rhythm switchups on "Arson Hotline", and the kamikaze fuck-it-all counterbeat on "Loose Traffic" all fit into the genre without bowing before its silly self-conscious rule: It ain't good if you can't dance to it. The Turbo Mattress EP did have two fairly straightforward dancepunk songs-- "Sick Machine" and "Eyes of the Secret North"-- but given the band's noisy prehistories, even these songs came off as relentless, spit-happy monsters that just happened to be danceable.
These days, it would seem The Chinese Stars are concerned only with being a one-trick dancepunk band. They've streamlined their act to cover just one relatively accessible sound, one friendly tempo, and one swishy hi-hat schtick. This is fine for a track or two on A Rare Sensation, especially considering that guitarist Paul Viera's serrated single-plucks and noisy bone-dry heaves on opener "Cheap City Halo" rival his best moments on Turbo Mattress, and Eric Paul's deceptively kind tambourine work loosens up the song's potentially too serious tone. Dance meets punk remarkably midway on "Girls of Las Vegas", to a large extent because of bassist Rick Pelletier's rubbery dub line that recalls PiL tracks "Memories" and "Careering".
But elsewhere on A Rare Sensation, tracks follow one another indistinguishably. An occasional this-or-that jumps out of the album's obnoxiously persistent monotony, but in most cases, it's Viera on guitar again, clearly the band's hardest working member. As was the case on Turbo Mattress, Viera has complete control over an entire spectrum of noise, from the mousey snickers on "Dressed to Get Blessed" to the speaker specters on "Electrodes in Captivity" to the pained whelps in "Hospital Fly". Moments like these make me wish that The Chinese Stars would realize something about themselves: They can pull off much more than this. Here, the band happened to put all their eggs into that basket, and A Rare Sensation sells them frustratingly short.
