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Black Starfuries: Rest Of The City

Bit of an odd one this. Hailing from Italy, Black Starfuries are an unusual amalgam of styles and images, leading to Rest Of The City being something that lands between extremely familiar, and pleasingly different. A quick look at the album's cover suggests modern post-rock, whereas the band shot on the back, which is all vests, baseball caps and chains, makes you think rock-rap crossover. Now whether the image is ironic (humour tends to struggle to cross geographical borders), or not, the music itself offers up a different story altogether, crushing together a sleaze rock outlook to a Grunge-like attack, via some rather, shall we say, confused lyrics.

The band are a trio of William Dogboy, Mr. Teko and Dr. Nikk - all good Italian names after all - nodding strongly towards the 80s Sunset Strip. A flavour that oozes and swirls through a lot of the guitar work on debut offering, Rest Of The City. Dogboy squeezes out low-slung, down and dirty riffing that sounds like it couldn't give a damn, all the while, creating a mighty groove that you can get your teeth into. However vocally Dogboy is a dead ringer for Sugar era Bob Mould, both in terms of how he delivers the words and the almost over-produced way in which they are presented. It actually works and as the sound toughens up from song to song, the effect gets more and more believable. It still makes you scratch your head from time to time, but there's no denying that there's something earnest and appealing about this strange mix of cultures.

If you like lyrics to be the lynchpin on which great albums are built, then move along now. You are definitely not going to find that here. In fact the only way in which Black Starfuries don't sound American, is in the way most of the words to almost all of the songs on this album make little, or no sense. Coming across more like phrases from an Italian-English dictionary, squelched together because the kinda rhyme. If however you can overcome that, then the likes of the assured "Rest Of The City", creeping, yet boisterous "She Goes" and gritty, insistent "Shiver" will, with familiarity, worm their way into your head.

Not the finished article by any stretch of the imagination, Black Starfuries have produced an album that sets them out as a little different from the norm. Whether that's a good thing, well, only time will tell.


Track Listing
1. Shiver
2. Alien
3. Back In The Day
4. Rest Of The City
5. Desert Storm
6. Sanctuary
7. Toy Boy
8. I Don't Want You
9. Free
10. Cigarette
11. She Goes

Added: September 2nd 2012
Reviewer: Steven Reid
Score:
Related Link: Black Starfuries Online
Hits: 2457
Language: english

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