Starcide - Blazar

This review was commissioned. However, it bears no weight on the score or decision. All reviews are written from an unbiased standpoint. 

There are very few qualities that I look forward to in instrumental releases. The most important aspect being evolution; if a song goes on for five or six minutes, does it have the staying power to keep me interested? Does it move, does it groove? Does it shift every once in a while into unknown territory instead of focusing on the same beat or rhythm for five minutes? Being that industrial techno duo Starcide are primarily instrumental producers, these are the questions that ran through my head as I listened to their debut EP “Blazar”. The answer is that, yes, they do know how to keep a song moving. But their mixing / mastering is questionable and they need a new vocalist. 

The first song on the album ‘Quasar’ has a minimalistic beat in the beginning; slow pace, as if you’re standing outside of a club and can just hear the cusp of the dancefloor song. Queer synths brighten the pallet, until it opens up with a dirty beat around the thirty-second mark. This is just the beginning before an earthquake occurs and the bulk of the song rises from the molten core around the one-minute and twenty-four second mark. From there we get breaks, such as around the two-minute and twenty-second mark, and a climax that brings everything together. This is what I’m talking about when I say songs need evolution; this five-and-half-minute track doesn’t feel like it lasts that long since it’s always thinking ahead.

The title track gives us some vocal work from the duo but this is entirely unnecessary. To be blunt, Starcide’s vocals aren’t great and don’t add anything to the song. Either they need to get a third member who knows how to sing, or they need to leave that behind cause it’s quite awful. The instrumental section is pretty good, though. I’m not quite as fond of this one as I was with ‘Quasar’, but it gets the job done. The mix on ‘Redshift’ is quite sloppy. Around the forty-five second mark I began to gain these thoughts; I wasn’t sure where Starcide wanted to go with the song. The gritty synth doesn’t fit that well, the vocals are off, and this sounds more like a demo in comparison to what they’ve previously shown on the EP. 

Thankfully, ‘Oort’ shows us why this duo does what they do. This is smashingly good industrial techno single with grand, pulsing basslines, experimental synths. A dancefloor killer waiting to shine. The last song on the album, ‘Gravitational Pit’, follows that same path. Pretty good (minus the vocals) that made me feel like I was playing some kind of futuristic racer on the PS2. 

This is a small glimpse into the world of Starcide and I will say that it’s a decent start. I think that some of the mixing and mastering is off, and that they could potentially hire outside help to get their future work more polished. What’s inexcusable about the EP are the vocals; they’re terrible and don’t work in any of the songs that they make an appearance in. Either get vocal lessons, hire a vocalist, or be rid of them entirely. But, what they do know how to do is structure a song. ‘Oort’ is a primary example of this with ‘Quasar’ a solid second. I have high hopes for this project; they just need to iron out some wrinkles.