Stellastarr*: Civilized

When front-man Shawn Christensen stated in our interview with him that this album would see a change in vocal style, he really wasn't kidding.

Gone is the low drawling, heavily affected accent. The kind of voice that you're sure must be him doing an impression of somebody else. Civilized brings use the mid-range, heavily affected accent. There are times when he lets the façade slip this time around though. Take the song "Tokyo Sky", it's a song of two halves certainly, the first section is a laid-back distorted groove with ample amounts of cowbell before the band kick the tyres and light the fires under its second half. What's notable though, is that for once, Christensen sounds entirely natural in his vocal performance, and the result is an entirely successful endeavour.

As for the scorching blankets of shoegaze-inspired distorted noise which adorn the culmination of the priorly referred to song, well, that's just the proverbial gravy. If you're picking your favourite song from each Stellastarr* album, you can feel free to add "Tokyo Sky" to "My Coco" and "Lost in Time".

If there was a theme to the evolution of the band in this album, it would be experimentation. For all its draws, few could argue that Harmonies For the Haunted was the reverbed up, dark doppelgänger of its predecessor. This time around though, the band take risks at every turn and juncture. It should come as little surprise then, that this is also their first album post-major label. It's funny how that always works out isn't it, it's almost as if the big companies don't want their bands to take risks with their art.

"Graffiti Eyes" is a microcosm of this fact. Driven, for the most part, by a drum and bass rhythm (that's the instruments, not the genre) we witness Christensen gravitate as close as any white man should to rapping (Eminem excepted). Give it some time though, and gradually a fog-strewn guitar melody sweeps in under the radar, joined by the always delightful backing vocals of Ms. Amanda Tannen. Then, with the smoothness of an Italian gigolo, we're suddenly in crashing chorus territory. By rights, this should be the track we all despise, but it works so perfectly it is impossible to muster even the slightest animosity, even when confronted with the "whoa oh" final section.

The shoegaze influence is ramped up to dominance come "Move On". You could be listening to a more masculine Lush or a Magnetic Fields song here, albeit with a mesmerising chorus which adds much needed velocity to the formula without losing its charm.

It almost defies belief, but everything these New Yorkers touch turns to gold, sort of like in that story, of that king, who when he touched things, they immediately turned priceless. Y'know, Don King. Organised crime aside though, there is barely a weak moment throughout the run of Civilized. If this is what happens when major label politics are taken out of the picture, well, let's just say that the fall of the global economy might have some benefits.

An album this good is worth a few billion starving, four-thousand suicides per day and unemployment of 92%.