Rockin' Our Turntable: Starfucker

By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 27, 2008 9:05PM

Despite Starfucker's rather brutish-sounding choice of band name, the music on their debut is anything but aggressive. We think the term for this sort of sound is synth-pop, or maybe disco-pop-rock, or maybe it's just simply pop. By the time you fall into the band's trance inducing pleasures -- which we predict will be about 20 seconds into the second track on the album "German Love" -- you won't give a fuck how you're supposed to classify these stars' ditties. If a band can get us to overlook an incredibly lame song title like "Myke Ptyson" by replacing punny imagery with images of sugar-soaked children maniacally clapping and smiling along to little more than a jaunty acoustic guitar, then ... well, then we think they deserve a certain level of respect for pulling that off.

There are indeed times when the same repetition that allows us to slip into Starfucker's songs morphs into something that begins to become something more annoying than hypnotic, but luckily in this digital age those moments are easily skipped. (For example, maybe you shouldn't even put "Laadeedaa" or "U Ba Khin" or "Holly" on your preferred personal music player. Trust us on this.) Starfucker are at their best when trying to craft tiny majesties out of minimal building blocks -- as on the aforementioned "German Love" and on the swirling "Pop Song" -- and it's those moments that draw us willingly into their misguidedly named orbit.

MP3: Starfucker "Pop Song"
MP3: Starfucker "German Love"

Starfucker plays tonight at Hideout, 1354 W Wabansia, 9 p.m., $8, 21+