Rating: NNN
You may know NYC duo Rob Corradetti and Kaia Wong from their other band, hallucinatory semi-sweet indie pop squad Mixel Pixel, who’ve been known to perform behind translucent screens with projections. Their Eastern Stars side project is kinda like Mixel Pixel with all the showboating, distortion and unnecessary bits trimmed off. Named after a date on which nothing significant happened, July 5th, 1961 sounds exactly the way you’d imagine an album recorded in a 21st-century Brooklyn basement to sound: packed with deadpan vocals, an anti-folk ethos that balances absurd humour and unabashed earnestness, periodic forays into electronics and weird-ass squelchy keyboards interwoven with pretty guitars. It’s engaging in its DIY glory, with hints of mid-90s shoegaze reverie and a nice raw ness that reminds me of Liz Phair’s Girlysound demos.
