On Loud New Shit, a shift to lightweight ponderousness sucks the faint breeze out of Rhode Island-born, Delaware-based electro-rock duo Stars as Eyes. It's to be expected: remix albums of limpid semi-electric music have a tendency to highlight both the weakest non-rock and non-electronic aspects of a group's work, often through the illusionary notion that, by stretching something longer and increasing the thread-count, the overall composition can be magically reborn as "experimental." Yet what usually remains after such a reifying hack job is an electronic pop song that rocks faintly or a faint rock song that has a couple computer burps here and there to remind you it was recorded in the so-called digital age.
More electro than past efforts, Loud New Shit includes eight remixes of tracks from last year's Enemy of Fun originals. In their purest (i.e. non-remixed) state, Stars as Eyes could be compared to Manitoba with a bland fixation on Stereolab, New Order, and OMD rather than the shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine or Ride. Add to this an ADD need for obvious rock dynamics, Stars as Eyes opt for up and down overdrive, rarely allowing for spaciousness to emerge in their overcrowded and unsuccessful approach to This Heat-style experiments. In this sense, however weak, Main's "Time Dilation" remix of "Our Light" is the strongest track on Loud New Shit, largely because its residual teeming of K.K. Null insect buzz doesn't even remotely resemble the anthemic original, tastefully avoiding the obvious laptop-guys-who-wanna-rock final payoff.
In the grand scheme, Stars as Eyes would benefit best not from remixing, but from an entire structural reconstitution. Integrating rock and electronic music is an old enough concept-- check out early Cul de Sac or the aforementioned This Heat's Deceit or Repeat, or use your imagination and go back further-- but when yoking the lazier, platitudinal aspects of each, the result is the sonic equivalent of the failed Amphicar.
While computers have opened up massive potential in music that's just starting to be plumbed in earnest, much of it is stapled to a click-track with a 120 BPM default, which makes it all sound a little like my wobbly, taped-together military march-time tin-can robot, the Sleeptron 2003. Despite what many offerings suggest, the merge takes more than a downloaded copy of ProTools and an extended Moogerfooger solo over My Bloody Valentine's "When You Sleep" slowed to a river of ones and zeros. It's a long way to go before this stuff will sound a tenth as fresh as, say, 1940s jazz, but if the expressive capability of your medium has expanded, why keep drawing stick-figure flipbook animations?
