Major Stars
Return to Form
Rating: 2.0/5.0
Label: Drag City
Though it takes Return to Form half an album to get there, there's a moment in "Low Grade" when Major Stars singer Sandra Barrett's voice not only breaks free of both the guitar squall that has oppressed her throughout the previous three-and-a-half songs, but finally sounds comfortable with its surroundings. Some of this sense carries over into the following "The Space You Know," where Barrett sounds like she's actually singing, instead of straining toward a kind of vixen-voiced mewing, a la the Detroit Cobras' Rachel Nagy.
These are only fleeting moments for the Boston-based Major Stars, however. Though they're a psych-metal band boasting a three-guitar lineup in Kate Village, Wayne Rogers and Tom Leonard, Major Stars really aren't served at all by Return to Form as a recording. The guitars, however many of them there are on each track, are compressed uncomfortably into one solid needle-in-the-red blur, with their tones most easily described as a woollier, rounder-sounding version of Billy Corgan's fuzz on Siamese Dream. The drums are negligible here, the bass is non-existent and Barrett's vocals are smothered by mid-range fuzzathon. The band has an obvious influence in Soundgarden, no strangers to molten riffs themselves; but whereas Chris Cornell's voice, love it or hate it, was dynamic, keening and effective in aurally slicing through the guitars' distortion. Barrett's range is simply no match for the guitar fervor on this record.
And Barrett isn't the only one under duress from those guitars; the solos here- and there are several, long ones- range from that of a caffeinated-Jimmy Page-"Heartbreaker" variety to the manic, wah-supernovas of Kim Thayil. Though without Page's patented "light and shade" philosophy toward composition, these outbursts of Tubescreaming noodling are excessive; a lot of a good thing doesn't guarantee a better thing.
I have to say, I don't doubt that Major Stars put on a hell of a show live and I love that they're from Boston. Having lived there for four years myself, I know what an ambivalent and downright unfriendly place it can be to local musicians and I'm surprised further that this kind of Orange Amplifier-worship is coming out of a city I'd long written off musically stagnant. While Sabbath riffing and acid-spiked soloing don't necessarily bring to mind the avant garde, it means that they are people there whom give enough of a shit to buck the status quo, and more power to them.
by Chris Middleman
