Dope Stars Inc.
Ultrawired

THE REVIEW

The Dope Stars Inc. sound more or less like one of those Japanese alternative rock bands that make anime theme songs, with often extravagant clothing and hairstyles and helium-sharp voices, decided to play electro-pop reinforced by a solid guitar exoskeleton.

Although they originate from Rome, their music has a blend of club electronics and hefty distortion, yet overall composed, which is rarely heard in our parts, and more often in the Land of the Rising Sun. In itself, combining electronics and brutal power chords is not a particularly original formula, but where it usually results in gothic atmospheres between nihilism and melancholy (see Marylin Manson & Co., and also the legions of Northern European bands making some variation on the theme), here you breathe a different air. Instead of blissfully wallowing in the languor of their own depression, Dope Stars Inc. seems to want to take you to a new and different world, theirs, full of sci-fi and pop culture references, where they move with the confidence, enthusiasm, and sometimes the naivety of a young boy. Rather than pompous virtual orchestrations, long and monotonous synthesizer interventions, minimal and desperate electronic piano parts, they prefer to stuff their arrangements with 8-bit arcade sounds drawing from a secure cultural baggage of retro-gaming.

The weak point of their proposition is partly due to the "concept" that underlies it, this sense of blind trust in a technological revolution that would already be underway and destined to take us into a new progressive cultural universe under the banner of "virtuality" as a beneficial condition in itself. Everything goes in this direction, from the elaborate artwork to the lyrics, which often wish to be generational anthems, but due to the very "niche" nature of this sort of proposition, they don't become so and instead end up seeming like naive speeches whose exuberant and enthusiastic tone clashes with the anguished chant of the newspaper front pages that their listeners read daily. Perhaps a similar position could have aroused more sympathy and interest in the technological, paranoid, and wasteful Nineties, in a pre-tsunami Far East full of illuminated signs, or in a future where the global warming time bomb had been defused, and where computer gurus made new discoveries, not found how to make the old ones more expensive; in short, in an elsewhere not too close. Here and now, it seems a bit out of place.  

Ultrawired from 2011 is their latest work, and also regarding the practical aspect of distributing their music, Dope Stars Inc. has chosen an original path; the album is distributed exclusively via free download from their official website, complete with artwork, with the possibility of making donations and purchasing a "blank" physical CD and having it sent by mail, then burning the downloadable ISO image onto it. The first half is the most successful, with compositions more balanced between techno-electro-synth-pop and distorted guitar riffs and with the most catchy "refrains" (Better Not To Joke, Save The Clock Tower, Banksters); the second loses something in terms of immediacy and aggression. It's advisable to listen to it at high volume.