The Other Stars
The Day We Met
(Take This To Heart Records)
A band with too many influences sewn onto its sleeve is the worst. Difficult to define or describe, the music becomes a dull, grey lump of sound without an identity. After all, we humans want to organize our experience; we want everything in its proper place place, and too often don’t know where to shelve a band whose most obvious influences include, say, Coheed and Cambria, Death Cab of Cutie, and Reel Big Fish.
Bands like The Other Stars are the exception. Sure, their music isn’t easy to define or describe (beyond the obligatory label “rock”), and their obvious influences lie on separate sides of the indie rock spectrum—pop-punk / emo (Say Anything, The Get Up Kids) and twangy indie rock (The Replacements, The Weakerthans). But The Day We Met, the band’s first full-length, is no dull, grey lump of sound.
Instead, there’s something about The Other Stars that feel so solid, so sharp. It’s there on songs like, “Fragile!” where full, bright guitars bounce against one another like blossoms in a tree, but snap suddenly together during a tight verse, all without losing momentum; singer and guitarist Connor Bird’s voice is composed, almost apathetic as he repeats, “We can make things right / or just stay inside for the night,” until the song lifts back to life, bobbing and blooming, and we can feel the full force of his voice. Bird is equally confident on the giddy, glinting opener “Everyone I Know,” and on “Castle Hill,” which lunges at the listener before its first beat; here, his voice contains Tom DeLonge’s whine and Chris Conley’s cadence, though his guitar rings like Bob Mould’s.
In some ways, Bird’s consistency is one of the few downsides of The Day We Met, which (except for two slower acoustic ballads) attacks with the same intensity track after track. Likewise, so much of the lyrics cover the same ground; songs like “Flood” and “Castle Hill” (and those aforementioned acoustic tracks) are sung to the same second-person you, in the same reminiscent tone, about the same better times (or maybe they were worse). But this consistency an another effect as well: On The Day We Met, Bird paints a complete portrait of a millennial at the edge of adulthood—defeated, destructive, lonely and longing, desperate to make sense of the past and the present.
A month before The Day We Met was released, Bird decided to break up The Other Stars, putting his own mental heath before his band, a laudable decision to say the least. What he left behind is an album that’s stylistically hard to define—not quite punk rock, more than mere indie college rock, and only approaching alt-country—but might just define a generation of listeners.
