4 out of 5

Label: Anchor Brain

Produced by: Keith Souza and Seth Manchester

In a couple more years, Eric Paul and selections of his Arab on Radar crew would again reassemble into the brutal noise rock of Doomsday Student, but before they get there, The Chinese Stars have one final recorded outing as dance punks.

At the time, without knowing of the forthcoming shift, Heaven On Speed Dial was what I wanted: the shimmy-shimmy groove of the Stars’ polished 31G sounds were undeniably fun, it just tapped into a then-zeitgeist of electropop in music that wasn’t really my bag. This is part of the ebb and flow of being an Eric Paul fan, though, as AoR started in a very similar vein to The Chinese Stars, then progressively got more and more abrasive, then morphed into this new band and started polishing their sound, and then a few years later would bring back the terror as Doomsday Student. (…And beyond that, would again go in an electro direction as Psychic Graveyard.) Depending on your preferences in that spectrum, you pick and choose what albums work best; since my preferences – what I wanted – lean towards the more chaotic, Heaven On Speed Dial’s opening barrage of Rabbit Face was an ideal marriage of The Stars’ repetitive guitar work and a wallop of forward momentum and live, crunchy percussion, a sound perhaps amped up by bringing in Seth Manchester to assist on production, and perhaps encouraged by a move to new label Anchor Brain which seemed, in its short life, to encourage a bit more of the Brainiac weirdness that’s always in the background of Paul’s work.

…Or whatever. Regardless of possibles motivations, this was a band shifting towards a much more dynamic sound than before, layering the guitars and synths and employing Paul’s vocals as another layer – not just an atonal drone – alongside actual bridges and breakdowns in their songs.

Lyrically, Speed Dial also continues the trend of the narratives becoming more paranoid and mature and less sex-focused, even if the double entendres are still there in song titles.

All of this growth, of course, ended up being a swan song, just as the last AoR release was, and it was maybe just shy of perfect, with the final few tracks starting to feel slightly undercooked, as though the group was working with a final reserve of energy that tuckers out as things go along. Still, the confession is: I don’t listen to The Chinese Stars much… except for this album. It maintains the polish the band employed in the sense that all its tracks feel fully considered as singles, but allows in some of the nerviness and edge of Paul’s previous (and later) bands.