4 out of 5

Label: Skin Graft

Produced by: Richard Ivan Pelletier

Appearing on Skin Graft and featuring Arab on Radar’s Eric Paul’s inimitable off-key whine over AoR bandmate Craig Kureck’s stiff but wild drumming, with cover art of little spermies swimming toward what you might’ve considered the band’s logo… it was very, very, very easy to evaluate this 5-song EP under the Arab on Radar banner. Original Stars’ bassist Richard Ivan Pelletier had a big part in their formative sound, though, leashing its pulse to the more dance-punk groove of their former band, Six Finger Satellite. And even if Paul’s sweaty, enthused singing style suggested otherwise, the lyrical content was quite a ways from AoR’s perversions, twisting words around bizarre imagery – less obsessive but perhaps no less cryptic, falling shy of being really complex by dint of their repetition: most songs consisted of just a few lines, repeated.

Which was kind of Chinese Stars’ relative weakness overall: splintering off of their no-wave roots and erring towards early 2000s dancey electro-punk, there can be a sameness in the pacing and beat of this tracks, which both AoR and SFS countered by the former leaning more towards art-rock and latter more towards punk. Turbo Mattress has some absolutely killer riffs – the interplay of grooving bass and guitar on The Fastest Horse Yet kills me – but you can still get mixed up where you are on this mini-album, as most tracks hit the same pace / register. Being so short, it’s not really much of an issue, and there’s the initial kick of hearing outsider artists package their work into something pretty damn accessible, plus awareness that its not quite that: this is still very weird stuff, recorded with rawness and immediacy that made it very exciting to consider how this project might develop.