:: Dear Superstar - Heartless

Dear Superstar

Generally you have a pretty good idea what a CD is going to sound like before you even get to hear it. But sometimes, you just don’t know what you’re getting until you press play on the CD player. And that’s exactly the sort of impression I got from Dear Superstar’s sophomore effort ‘Heartless’. Visually, it’s safe to say that the Manchester based outfit looked like your standard emo-rock act. But where things get a little mixed is in their description of their music, which they proudly proclaim is pure rock ‘n’ roll. So it begged the question, are Dear Superstar an emo-rock outfit, or a plain rock and roll outfit? Well the answer is they’re sort of a bit of both. The opening track ‘Brink Of Destruction’ is a great rock and roll number that has plenty of rock-like riffing, ganged vocals, classic rock solos and the all important anthem-like chorus, but its vocalist Micky Satiar that brings in the emo element to the band’s strange sound, with his nasally vocal presence and clean vocals. The mix does sound a little strange, but somehow ‘Brink Of Destruction’ seems to work well.

‘Brothers In Blood’ is every bit as energetic and rocking as the opener, with the band, but then you get tracks such as ‘Live Love Lie’, ‘Anytime Anyplace’ and ‘Signposts To Bedposts’, where screamed vocals are thrown into the band’s sound, which somehow changes the whole perception of what you assumed was Dear Superstar’s true sound, with the band sounding more along the lines of every other emo-rock act on the scene. In an attempt to blur the line between classic hard rock and emo-rock, the band try their hardest to inject a bit of a sleaze/glam influence into ‘Raised Voices And Confrontations’, which as you can imagine fails terribly with the song sounding too mixed up and pulling at too many different directions. Towards the tail end, the album does pick up a little with the straight ahead rock sound of ‘Diseased And Distraught’ and ‘Can’t Write A Love Song’, but its not enough to salvage what is inevitably a confusing sounding album. Dear Superstar are an O.K. band, and ‘Heartless’ is an O.K. listen. But until the band manage to figure out which direction they really want to head in, they’ll be nothing more than what they are now, and that’s an emo-rock act that trying hard to pretend they’re a hard rock act in order to stand out from the pack.