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As a product of a Welsh valley currently steeped in "museum culture," I tend to envy bands like Belle and Sebastian and Camera Obscura, more than anything perhaps for being able to express the deepest, most complex modern sentiments with an easy poetry that sounds so stunning in their drifting melodies, whereas I sometimes I feel we at home are invariably left hammering at the door.
Maybe because of the extent that our culture is trapped in intellectual retrogression, we don't yet have that easy function, that sureness of voice to make new sounds with modern feelings. As in any truly working class community (and by this I mean a community honed down to a fine point of homogeneity through absolute necessity), acceptance here is everything, and the two options in art are often to express a facile sense of self-assurance, or claw desperately at the walls of creativity.
The Donde Stars are caught in the outer reaches of the former and the inner sanctum of the latter, clinging onto shadows of heroes and just trying so hard to make something personal in montage. The Stars' sound is that of sheer determination and monumental effort, of screeching guitars and searching lyrics, of torn up hearts and imagination fighting for fulfilment, of sheer friction and contrasts. But look down deeper and there's a noble story playing out in which one observes a kind of Herman Hessean inner journey of turbulent poignancy.
If they can build paths from hell with ghosts of the dead, and arrive at words and melodies with dignity intact, it'll be the greatest kind of poetic justice.
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