3 out of 5

Label: Owned & Operated Recordings

Produced by: Paul Malinowski

I go back and forth on Shiner’s Starless. It’s kind of what formed my initial opinions of the band as milquetoast, only to be quite surprised years later when returning to their earlier (and later) albums and being blown away by their ferocity and complexity. Part of me still hears that initial opinion – the watered down production; the way the compositions avoid conflict; the open-ended lyricism that starts to tickle emo woe – but I also recognize how weird the album is in comparison to the preceding Lula Divinia, and how that was kind of a risk for that band. It could be painted as selling out in a sense, to fit in with some similar heavy-but-pretty acts of the era, except that’s where the other intention of using the attribute ‘weird’ comes into play, as Starless is stuffed with so many musical touches that essentially repurpose the math of the previous releases into flourish. It doesn’t all fit, really, and so I still battle with myself: is this good or bad? …And ultimately, I think I have to respect the craft and dedication to a sound, even if it’s not an album I’ll often return to.

Starless still sounds like Shiner, at the very least. Spinning gives us meaty drums, head bobbing bass, and a shredding central riff. Allen Epley’s voice has matured with some arena-rock smoothness which is a good match for the band’s generally Big sound. …But when the second layer of guitar and similarly layered vocals come into play, it’s our next indicator that that arena-rockness is part of the album’s pursuit: it’s all very smooth, and breaks and angularity have been swapped out for swooning hooks and radio-ready rock; try not to cringe a little bit at the electronics inserts at the start of followup track Giant’s Chair.

Now, alongside that cringe, and throughout the album, you’ll start to hear some really interesting things. Epley’s counter-melody vocals on Chair, for example, are really alluring; Josh Newton’s additional guitar and keys gives the band more options for expanding their sound, which tends to be buried in the mix – as it favors that radio-ready sound – but it’s there for your discovery; and the group does still rock, if intermittently, with tracks like Unglued suddenly shifting back into old school Shiner heft, waking you up from potential emo-rock slumber.

But, yeah, the imagery and personal narratives feel a bit wishy-washy here for the sake of more generalized tales of distress, which felt / feels very on brand for what was going on in climbing-the-charts indie rock at the time. And the way tracks will continually dive out of the way of giving us anything really challenging is frustrating – songs offer some buildups that would work great for some kind of swerving conclusion, but instead just do another verse-chorus loop and end. It’s pretty slick stuff. On another day, I may judge that more harshly, but with some time, I don’t actually think this was an attempt to appease the scene, since the change may have burned more Shiner fans than it gained. It was, instead, an indication of where the band / Epley would be going, though the growth spurt expressed itself in a perhaps bland fashion.