No Cigar, Shock Star

Bust out the defibrillators, everyone; rock newbies, Shock Stars, are selling out shows in the Midwest and putting fans into cardiac arrest in the process. Or at least their album name, cover artwork, song titles, and hospitular lyrics would have you believe as much. You’re right: hospitular isn’t a word, but in reality, the popular Chicago electro-rock sextet is what you might call a “thumbs-neither” on Pandora. Not great enough to merit a thumbs-up, but not crappy or irritating enough to banish to Pandora pergutory forever.

The band blends a mix of great guitar leads with a catchy synthesizer/electronic drum setup, but falls entirely short in the lyrics department. Think Danger Radio, only if they took themselves way more seriously and repeated the same 3 lines continuously in every song. “I Got a Feeling”, for example, starts out fairly promising (if you skip the weird scream at the first) with a dancy beat and a catchy, Finger-Eleven-Paralyzer ripoff guitar lead, but then punches itself squarely in the crotch once the verse starts, eventually demoralizing you into a gray blobular soup by the time the ultra-repetitive chorus comes around. Most of the rest of their first release, Feel For A Heartbeat, feels this same way, too.

However, there are a few songs, such as “EMT”, that really hook you, foreshadowing good things to come out of the Shock Stars amplifiers in say, Album 2? I imagine that live shows are very fun, because you can’t understand lyrics anyway in a concert, and Shock Stars really seem to know how to craft a catchy beat with great electro-rock instumentation.

So in the words of the Millencolin song that got me into punk in the first place, close, Shock Stars, but no cigar. We’ll still not thumb you down on Pandora in hopes that the next release is just a lyrical notch above Feel For A Heartbeat. Because we definitely won’t want to miss it if it is.

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