Stars & Sons

If It's Good For Me

Released on 12th April via Twice Burnt Records

Brighton’s Stars and Sons will release their helter skelter debut album, ‘Good Morning Mother’, on 26th April. It will be preceded by the chaotic piano-pop of ‘If It’s Good For Me’, and comes complete with a promo video that allows singer Mike Lord to finally make use of his grade C at GCSE Drama.

In October 2007, Colchester Zoo realised that temp sandwich kid Mike Lord was still being paid. He saw his future there, among the animals: like a beast born in captivity, he was incapable of imagining life in the real jungle. However, falling ice-cream sales and lacklustre postcard displays saw that Lord was sent packing back to the seaside town of Brighton. Once there, he set upon a series of low-profile failures as a bin-man, a hot-dog vendor and a street pharmacist. Only then did Lord turn his hand to music, and what a hand he turned. A childhood spent covertly nabbing Flaming Lips albums from older brothers’ bedrooms had not been spent in vain.

Stars and Sons, then, are the Frankensteinian fall-out of Mike Lord, together with two Scots (Sandy and Stuart) fellow Brighton-resident Paul Steel and newbie Luke Sital Singh. Inspired by Abba, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Animal Collective – and that’s just the A’s- they set to recording their debut album with Dave Eringa (Manic Street Preachers, Kylie, Idlewild). They realised that to fulfil their vision, they would have to leave the comfortable pleasantries of Brighton behind, and travel to the most desolate of outreaches: North Wales. It was at the foot of Mount Snowdon that they spent two weeks perfecting their vision.

The result, ‘Good Morning Mother’, is a genuinely eclectic technicolour pop album; marked by orchestral flourishes, dramatic tempo shifts, and consistently dazzling song-writing. Stylistically, it simply refuses to sit still. Previous single ‘In The Ocean’ is a hundred-mile-an-hour race to the finish, complete with screeching guitars, plinky xylophones and quietly urging harmonies. Five hundred copies – ALL hand-painted - were released earlier this year, accompanying a video that exhibited an underwater dance scene with a girl in a Scarlett Johansson mask. Yet for all its eccentricities, ‘Good Morning Mother’ is a supremely focused, expertly crafted effort. ‘Outside my Feet’ is an intricate, rhythmic and hypnotic affair, offset by an almost Eastern score, whilst ‘Futureproof’ is a perfumed love-letter to the Lennon and McCartney school of classic pop.

Stars and Sons have picked up early support from Jonathan Ross, Huw Stephens and Zane Lowe, though you won’t catch them name-dropping or anything like that. Having completed the album, and chronicled the occasion in a genuinely hilarious three-part Youtube doc, Stars & Sons have gone on to support the likes of Hockey, Okkervil River and Dr Dog. They will announce a host of shows shortly, and have certainly come a long way from the bedroom demo recordings that sewed the seeds for this accomplished debut release.

www.myspace.com/starsandsonsuk