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Black Tape for a Blue Girl
Halo Star
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When planets align, extraordinary things happen; there is focus on the future, the past, and the immensity of the power and beauty of such an occurrence. We talk about it before it comes into being and remember it long after it has passed. Such is the case with Halo Star, Black Tape for a Blue Girl’s latest entry into their already incredible catalog. Halo Star is the band’s ascendant star in their 9-album universe with a stunning focus on their career both past and present while leading into the future. And with good reason.
Halo Star is a collection of inspired songs that immediately becomes the molten core of their history. They have never before combined the elements of aggressive rock with their compelling philosophic excursions into broken souls and ruined life upon beds of neo-classicism. The new blend is exhilarating. The resulting experience is anger, tenderness, hatred, and lost resolve formulating into a series of expressive notes that wrap around you like a blanket. Black Tape for a Blue Girl’s Halo Star is a unique creation with its merge of darkwave and hard-edged rock, using highly communicative middle-eastern tonalities and other methods to construct elements of emotion that makes your next trip into the universe of black tape one of insight and awe. Whether that insight is full of pain, rejection, sadness, or anger, it’s deeply felt and expertly communicated.
The album jumps at you with the engaging, rhythmic “Glow” which employs a heavy percussive effect with disturbing Middle Eastern music pulsing through its too short expanse. But it opens the gates with a nod to something different, something far more impacting than prior Black Tape for a Blue Girl albums. What this album does is reshape the body of this band into something more completely evolved. Rosenthal’s vision for the band has taken it into a place unvisited; a primal place where you part a veil to reveal a dark core of energy. This energy produces a BtfaBG album unlike anything you have yet heard from them to date. What is retained is Rosenthal’s deep lyrical ability to unearth and disclose the monsters buried within all of us. With openers like “Glow” and the anxious “Tarnished”, Halo Star offers itself as an album of change.
“The Gravediggers” is an acoustically delivered tune that adds to the presentation of the overall work while not overshadowing the voice of the story. With Feuer’s rain-smooth flute, “The Gravediggers” uses death and burial as a metaphor for the cold fear of eventual failure. “Your Love is Sweeter than Wine” is familiar BTfaBG legacy yet providing a rhythmic undercurrent that effectively carries the song along.
Halo Star has many styles blended into this album. There is humour as heard in their gothic satire of Tony Orlando & Dawn’s “Knock Three Times” in Rosenthal’s own “knock three time”; a styled tune in “Scarecrow” that precedes the gorgeous “Damn Swan!” which uses parts of Yeats’ Leda and the Swan as lyric. With the emotional draw of Richards’ violin, the spiritually drenched flute of Lisa Feuer, Michael Laird’s acoustic guitar and percussion, along with the gothic tinges of Bret Helm and Elysabeth Grant’s unmatched vocals, and Sam Rosenthal’s structure and sense of adventure, all of Halo Star is an album that demands attention.
Halo Star is something different yet remarkably reminiscent. Rosenthal has re-created Black Tape for a Blue Girl by writing a series of songs that are steeped in legacy yet ascending to a new plane of art. It’s made all the more amazing because we know BTfaBG to be something more to the world of music by their qualitative reverence to their musical approach. Never afraid to be different, Rosenthal has taken Black Tape for a Blue Girl to the next level. You will be absorbed by this new and important release.
Track Listing:
Glow / Tarnished / The Gravediggers / Your Love is Sweeter Than Wine / Indefinable, Yet / Knock Three Times / Scarecrow / Damn Swan! / Already Forgotten / The Fourth Footstep / Dagger / Halo Star.
Black Tape for a Blue Girl:
Sam Rosenthal - Electronics / Faux Piano / Moog
Bret Helm - Vocals / Guitar / Bass
Lisa Feuer - Flute
Vicki Richards - Violin
Michael Laird - Guitar / Percussion / Dulcimer
Elysabeth Grant - Vocals
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