UK band Lovestarrs are the Rocky Balboa of the SynthPop world. They keep getting knocked down, and keep getting back up again. Sarah Mackintosh rose to critical acclaim as The Good Natured; starting with her Grandma’s old Yamaha keyboard and ending up as one of Britain’s most hotly tipped Indie-Electro acts. Juggling moody lyrics and a Gothy aesthetic with catchy and rousing ElectroPop tunes, The Good Natured were one of the more interesting and unique acts in a saturated mid-2000’s scene.
The the setbacks begun. Signing to Parlophone seemed like a good thing at the time with the backing of another EP and the announcement of the forthcoming album, to be titled Prism. A good thing short-lived though with the news, after a period of quiet, that The Good Natured had been dropped from the major and had spent the previous few month trying to secure the rights to the Prism masters; to no avail. The album was buried, and The Good Natured died.
In our opinion, this is the biggest dick move a major label can pull. We’ve seen it happen before and we’ll see it happen again. We don’t understand why, if you’re dropping an artist, you can’t just let them release their recordings. Sure, you’ve paid for them; so let them release them themselves and take a cut (surely that way at least you get something back for the recordings you paid for rather than nothing at all). It makes no sense to us and largely just comes across as spiteful.
Anyhoo, you can’t keep a good act down; and with almost a middle finger to the music industry, Sarah came bursting back on our radar as the bombastic Lovestarrs. Backed by her brother Hamish, Sarah’s new output was buoyant and optimistic. Pink replaced back and exuberance replaced gloom; and their début single, Get Your Sexy On, was a party fuelling manifesto proclaiming that Lovestarrs was a different beast to The Good Natured, keeping the lush SynthPop textures but washing them in a lavish, colourful nostalgia (epitomised by 80s Love Song, one of our top tunes of 2014).
Now staunchly DIY (and who can blame them) despite working with indie label Defdisco, Lovestarrs have set up a Kickstarter campaign to cover the release of their next two EPs and début album. The plan is to pay for the releases themselves, and licence them to Defdisco. The desire to pay for, and own, their own records is completely understandable coming from a band who had the last album they recorded held hostage. It’s one of the worthier Kickstarter campaigns we’ve come across. These guys deserve to own their own music, we can imagine how heartbreaking it was to record your début album and then have it disappeared by gangsters.
Lovestarrs are serious about this too; one of the rewards (in exchange for a shit ton of money!) is Sarah’s Grandma’s aforementioned Yamaha keyboard!
The duo have been releasing teasers of what to expect from the releases, you will hopefully find it in your heart it help out with, on their SoundCloud page in the past couple of weeks. From the chant-a-long fun of WTF to the robotic rabble-rousing of Frank Sinatra the album sounds like it’ll be wearing it’s 80s influences on it’s sleeve. Tracks like Somebody Like You sound classic Sarah Macintosh (whether The Good Natured or Lovestarrs) while the likes of Good Girls sound like the will bring something new, and more contemporary, to the table.
Just do it. Go and contribute. Lovestarrs deserve this and, goddammit, we want this album released.
♫ Lovestarrs – WTF (Demo.) (Snippet)
♫ Lovestarrs – Frank Sinatra (Demo.) (Snippet)
♫ Lovestarrs – Somebody Like You (Demo.) (Snippet)
♫ Lovestarrs – Good Girls (Demo.) (Snippet)
Get on board with Lovestarrs’ Kickstarter campaign here.
Buy Lovestarrs’ music from:
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