London band, who won’t be told what to be, make their superb debut statement
They (well, Black Stone Cherry anyway) reckon that the darkest hour ain’t always before the dawn. If that’s true no one told London’s Staring Out The Sun.
Pick any song, pretty much on their debut full-length record and you don’t have to look too hard or peel away too any layers to find some real pain and misery.
For example, second song, the brilliant “Hero” contains a line that “only the dead have seen the end of war”. What SOTS have so deftly done is package this all up in punchy rhythms, the odd soaraway chorus and some fine guitar work.
So much so, in fact, that if you so wished you could just listen to the likes of “Fuzzy Thinking” and treat them as merely superb pop rock songs, of a similar vintage to those that the mighty Zico Chain used to write, but that would be to do them a disservice.
More thought has gone into “Lonestar” than that. Its mighty groove, melody and thoughtful lyrics which turn on “every song that sounds the same” deserve more consideration. That’s not to say that SOTS can’t just get their heads down and slam with the best of them. “Versus” wants to get in the fast lane and stay there, recalling the ghost of Feeder as it does, and “Karoshi” pulls off that old Wildhearts trick of doing a fully formed song in under 50 seconds.
Best of all here is “Where Are We?” which distils all the ideas here into a song that deserves to be the four-minute soundtrack to your summer, and if you can get its hook out of your head you’ve done pretty well.
There is an ambition about this band that needs to be commended. A band who, lest we forget, released a film to complement their last EP, and what is here on “Dawn” is designed with one eye on arenas, “Panic Stations” is happy to occupy the same space as Biffy at their heaviest, and such chutzpah deserves praise, and if “Time” is heavier, then its still better than anything Foo Fighters heave released in years.
Chances are taken here, but rather than being a mish-mash, there’s an admirable coherence about “Dawn” musically, the staccato “Always” fits, but as the lyrics talk about putting a pillow over someones face then thank christ we aren’t dealing with a Bon Jovi cover here.
Ending with “Roots” and its clever keyboard use and fine guitar solo, “Dawn” is an album of which Staring Out The Sun can be extremely proud of. It’s familiar yet fresh and it’s the work of a band that stands out amongst the pack.
Rating 8/10
