Shimmering Stars Violent Hearts
(Sub Pop)
From the first moment of Violent Hearts, Shimmering Stars seem to have produced an album with some nice melodies, some fun guitar work, and a smattering of reverb. Most of that stays true throughout a listen, but the reverb piles up over the 30 minutes the album takes to run its course. As a result, any delight taken with the nice use of melody and the playful guitar work is quickly thrust aside as the oppressive sound continues to build.
It’s hard to definitely call Violent Hearts a bad album, because when it finished, I wasn’t sure I’d really listened to an album at all. I mean, it all flowed together well enough, but what flowed together was, well, a stream of reverb and not much else. There are even some good melodic ideas here, but they too have been drowned by that same reverb that permeates every shimmering pore.
It’s not as if Shimmering Stars are somehow evoking the lo-fi movement by soaking the vocals, drums, guitars and bass in this thick, muddy reverb. No, the recording on the instrumentation doesn’t reach that lo-fi measure, and while everything sounds somewhat badly recorded, it’s only because the “Hall” setting has been turned on several times. It’s not as if Shimmering Stars is evoking the shoegazing movement, either. The vocals are obscured, but nothing else really meshes. Sure, the vocals sound a bit like an instrument, but they sound like an out-of-place instrument that’s been dropped into an otherwise interesting mix.
I wanted to like Violent Hearts — I really did. When I tried, I was shown some fun ideas (really, there are some!), but the first two tracks are the best the album has to offer, and that feeling of being covered in molasses got to be a bit much. If there were a little sonic room, and maybe if the vocals had room to breathe, this might be a different story. But no amount of nice ‘50s-beach-music riffing can account for the damage done to my ears by the immoderate use of reverb.