EP Review Been Stellar - Been Stellar

Serving up soul-slugging, shoegaze-lite romps about Big Apple adolescence, this self-titled EP needs barely lift its fingers to explain why Been Stellar are causing such stirs. With emotions cranked to the fullest throttle, each hook and chorus burnished for maximal impact, the New York-based quintet focus those raging, youth-ridden feelings you only get when you’re tough, heart-broken, and 23; that overwhelming sense that the world is about to come crashing down, that the broken earth will fissure and swallow you up whole. It’s a feeling that can only be duly conveyed through sonorous, distorted guitar shreds, gut-yanking chord punches, and broken-throated bawls into the existential void of a microphone, as on ‘Kids 1995’: “Even if I am solipsistic / Would it really make any difference? / Because as much as I tell myself it’s real / It’s just as real / As it really isn’t.” This is the Been Stellar frame of existence: burn brightly and passionately, as the sands shift erratically beneath you; suck up the lumps in your throat - stride loudly on.