STARRED at Club Europa,Brooklyn.

The primary sonic reference for LA-NYC-based band Starred – formed by Matthew Koshak and Liza Thorn – was originally compared to the Paisley Underground bands (Rain Parade, Opal and Mazzy Star) but this is a severe oversimplification  A better description would be Spiritualized living under the Mojave sky with a perverted love of both Americana music and ambient noise – a music of negative spaces, made by really intense people.

Koshak is a brilliant musician, merging drone, noise and reverberation with subtle Americana chords (Ry Cooder’s score for “Paris, Texas”, The Velvet Underground’s “Ocean,” and the dissonant noise of Ben Frost could be references) while Thorn at one moment dissolves in languor at the stage and in the next channels Marianne Faithful circa Broken English.

All this fits well for a Sunday night concert at Europa, a Polish-American club in the heart of Greenpoint in Brooklyn. The band plays a short set that peaks with the epic “LA Drugs” and the narcotizing drone coming from the army of pedals and synths commanded by Koshak.

Among the soulless-garbage-ironic-DIY-chill-wave that floods Brooklyn these days, Starred gives a dose of decay, resurrection, depravity, and levitation. You should find a way to see Starred live. If only because the road gets darker from here.

PS. Starred’s “Prison to Prison” EP comes out November,20th by Pendu Sound Recordings. More here.

Photographs by Jennifer Di Donna/Filmstrip Photography.