Good Morning Mother

Unique. Piano-pop. Brash, intelligent indie-pop. The truth is, it’s pretty hard to place Stars and Sons. It’s an odd form of alternative-pop, and at first listen you might just find yourself wondering if Alphabeat, Same Difference and Mika have got together, and then called in Andrew Lloyd Webber for musical direction. The album sounds like it wouldn’t be too out of place accompanying a musical, whilst at the same time fitting in at the NME stage at Reading festival.

The five bouncy Brighton poppers have definitely produced an interesting debut album in Good Morning Mother. The group are new on the scene, though not entirely unknown; they’re big enough to have scooped some BBC radio-play courtesy of Lauren Lavern, yet not enough to have more than a single song on Spotify, or even a Wikipedia entry (because let’s be honest, you’ve not made it till you’re on Wiki). Despite this however, Stars and Sons have managed to scoop Mr Dave Eringa to produce the new album, a man responsible for producing records by the likes of Ash, Manic Street Preachers and even Kylie.

The band claim to have influences ranging from The Beach Boys to Bullet for my Valentine, and this is the kind of variety you can expect to hear on Good Morning Mother. There are no songs about surfing in the USA, nor is there a face-melting guitar-shredding session ever thirty seconds, but the variety of the tracks will raise an eyebrow. The album’s opening track, ‘Out of View’, sounds something like an odd combination of Wicked (the musical) and music from The Sims. From here, we move to songs that sound like Queen, Maroon 5 and Mika have all spent a few hours on acid together, to Empty Hands which sounds more like a Radiohead-meets-Oasis-esque attempt at pop-with-violins.

The album is definitely a ‘grower.’ At first listen it’s easy to get lost in all the twinkly xylophones, swinging drum rhythms and electronic synth effects, but after a while it all starts to blend together quite nicely. What it blends into however, is still something of a mystery. One thing that’s certain is that you won’t hear another album quite like it any time soon… and we’re still not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.