Her Ride To The Stars

By: The Microdance

Reviewed by: soundjunkie

This band is showing some serious promise!

Beautiful, intense and melodic

Okay, I ended up hearing this CD round my friend's house at 3am after we had returned from a pretty heavy night out! The opening track 'Digging up dreams; grabbed me right away because I loved the guitar sound and the riffs were fantastic. The production on this song stood out to me too; it was heavy yet soothing and layered without being cluttered. Beautiful, wistful versus (I think there's a male female harmony going on) lead into sing-along choruses, there's a sweet solo here too and a great outro section... a hell of a lot crammed into under 4 minutes. The second track 'Her Ride To The Stars' confirmed to me that I was gonna like this band. Think the Killers meets New Order with some Pixies thrown in for good measure! The bass tone could be the cure and the guitars are right out of the eighties too, but something about the song screams modernity. Another great solo and an amazing outro section complete with Sigur Ros guitars bringing the shoegaze, and I'm convinced this band has everything I love about modern music in their armoury! The third track 'Micro Machine' is HUGE! Great arpeggio to start, followed by a Peter Hook special bass riff and then right into those dream rock guitars and into a majestic verse where dreamy contendedness is counterbalanced by the lyric 'Too F***ed to function, but my wheels are in motion'. The chorus of this song is uplifting and contains some wonderful guitars bordering on dream-pop but holding back enough to maintain clarity. Another solo - this one right out of the Corgan handbook; all messy slides, bends and modulation, a Kate Bush meets Andy Summers breakdown, a wonderful gallopping cresendo (The drums on this song are fantastic) and a near heavy metal outro make this my fave on the disc. Track 4 'Other Pretty Girls' is a beautiful seven minute acoustic number full of regret and hope in equal measures. This is one for those late nights, headphones under the stars. In fact, the whole CD is. It's representitive of a new band whose chief songwriter (Alex Keevill) has clearly got a grip on what he wants from his music. It's diverse enough to keep your undivided attention whilst an aesthetic thread weaves its way throughout ensuring it's cohesion. One complaint would be that it would be nice to hear Keevill really let go; that maybe a full album full of music this thought out and polished may miss those much needed spontaneous, spiky moments needed to complete a well-rounded classic. This is a minor complaint though for a band that have already ticked so many of my boxes so early in their career! My friend is still waiting for me to return his CD, i suggest he doesn't hold his breath!

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