Black Hearted Brother - Stars Are Our Home (2013)

"The full-fledged return of shoegaze… probably won’t ever happen, because My Bloody Valentine have assured shoegazing aspirants that attempts to replicate their legend will be met with nigh impossible odds and Kevin Shields calling you at home and breathing heavily into the receiver. But there’s an alternative: design sneakers with a smartphone enclosure, so that hypnotized stares can be redirected from the hands down to the feet. Thus, we have the rebirth of shoegaze! One could also predict a simultaneous and unprecedented boon to the chiropractic industry.

Here’s yet another alternative: refer to the music being created as something else entirely, such as “indulgent space rawk” — the phrase used by Neil Halstead, formerly of Slowdive, to describe the debut album from Black Hearted Brother, a band comprised of Halstead, Mark Van Hoen (Locust, Seefeel), and Nick Holton (Opulent Oog). We only have but one single to go on, listenable below, but the fuzziness presides, even if the track ultimately does have a certain “rawk” quality to it.

"Stars Are Our Home" will be released on October 22 through Slumberland, and proclamations of spaciness aside, Halstead assures us of the album’s intra-diversity: “The idea was to just make a record that was in some ways ‘unedited.’ To not worry about a particular sound or style, but to just go with the flow. We all make quite focused records individually so, as Mark says, it’s our ‘guilty pleasures’ album.” And re: the point about “guilty pleasures,” who hasn’t occasionally spent a weekend dressed in a tinfoil body suit as a means of warding off remote control from extra-terrestrials? Yeah, an alien influence appears, if you judge by the tracklisting. Not the children! Take meeeeeeeee…" -tinymixtapes

Album art: 

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