Chicago trio Star become modern noise-pop greats on Violence Against StarSteve Krakowon October 29, 2020 at 1:00 pm

As tempting as it is to indulge my wee-lad love of all things dream pop and compare Star’s fresh take on shoegaze to early-90s wombadelic practitioners (I’m not making up the term “wombadelia,” though it never really caught on), the band prefer the more open-ended tag “noise pop.” That said, the catchy three-minute nuggets on the local trio’s second album, Violence Against Star, sound like they could’ve charted in the UK alongside Ride and Lush if they’d been released in, say, 1992. Opening cut “Angel School Anthem” is basically a mission statement for their wall of sound, combining Shannon Roberts’s dark, cooing vocals bathed in oodles of delay, Theodore Beck’s subterranean bass and huge, four-on-the-floor programmed beats, and Scott Cortez’s scuzzy ripples of guitar.…Read More