\We get that a lot.""
Five months after their self-titled debut album's release, Stellastarr* are still dogged by the same criticism-that they are too derivative of the bands that influenced them, bands as far apart as the Pixies and the Talking Heads.
Bassist Amanda Tannen passes it off as a quirk of the reviewing process.""We get that a lot. You have to compare a band to something. We get compared to a whole bunch of bands. Sometimes we've never heard of them.""
But time and again, reviewers have pointed it out: down to the Robert Smith vocals, Stellastarr*'s music sounds disturbingly close to the new-wave elements of The Cure. And with down-tempo choruses and surf guitar over strong basslines, Stellastarr* will never escape comparisons to the Pixies.
And this keeps getting mentioned as a bad thing.
Tannen is shockingly offended when lumped in to the new wave of new wave bands like Hot Hot Heat and Interpol (she bitterly replies ""I don't think we consider ourselves a new wave revival band.""). And with their synthesizers and guitars and the rock 'n' roll versus it seems hard to argue-they are a new wave band. But Tannen has a point: Stellastarr* are not a genre band in the same way that the Hives were, they are not a band using the genre as a gimmick. They are a band who writes pretty good songs that happen to be new wave.
Tannen claims to only recently have begun to listen to new wave, and the bands that shaped her rarely cross into post punk. ""Bowie, and Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel - I loved Sonic Youth growing up. So I was all over the board. But I never really listened to new wave until the past couple of years.""
Stellastarr* started playing music in the same New York music scene that was giving birth to the Strokes. ""We played with them for our first show,"" said Tannen. ""They were together for about a year, and they hadn't broke yet.
""When we started, it was all about garage rock, and we were doing something that was totally not garage rock. It worked okay,
it was just that the bills were a little diverse.""
While The Strokes were commended for bringing back garage rock and emphasizing its fun, bringing back new wave and emphasizing its content didn't seem to gain Stellastarr* the same reverence.
Which is too bad. Stellastarr*'s songs may mimic other bands styles, but Stellastarr*'s songwriting rivals the quality of the bands they sound most like. The brooding, circling Joy Division synthesizer of ""My Walls"" is expertly done. The ""Where is my Mind"" refrains of ""Jenny"" smoothes its rougher verses with the same chipper enthusiasm as the Pixies original. The Cure atmospheric buildup of ""Moongirl"" is every bit as subtle and every bit as necessary.
Yes, Stellastarr* plays music very similar to the Cure. But they are as much kindred spirits to the band as poachers of their style. Much of the band, including lead singer Shawn Christensen, didn't listen to the Cure until interviewers prodded them. ""I didn't really get into it until I was in college,"" she explained. ""I didn't get into it while they were big, I was too young. I think that maybe the Cure's influences are similar to our influences-it's hard to explain where things come from. We didn't start out in this band and say 'We want to sound like this.'""
And above all else, last year's release was their debut. Even if they sound derivative now, they have a career to find a more personal voice.
Stellastarr* will make their Madison debut in two weeks at The Annex. And they'll be around again-the band has started work on a follow-up to be released next winter.
