I love 60s music. I like photos of Swinging London and England in the 1960s because it was such a vibrant, weird, jubilant time for youth culture, particularly the mod subculture. Naturally, my appreciation also extends to the various mod revivals that followed in the proceeding decades. The Secret Affair did a great cover of Frank Wilson’s Do I Love You? Fight me.
The Electric Stars are a pop band from Manchester, and they definitely have the mod senses of sharp dress (check out photos of their live performances where you can see vocalist Jason Edge decked out in the beautifully designed Soho Scarves) and sophisticated tastes perfected. Velvet Elvis is their 2nd album and it is one hell of a ride, for sure.
A little background; The Electric Stars released their 1st album, 2012’s Sonic Candy Soul, on UK independent label Detour Records, which was also the home of another of my favourite vintage-minded English bands, The Sha La Las (who hail from the same hometown as The Jam: Woking, Surrey). Velvet Elvis nearly a decade later shows a band that hasn’t been afraid to mature and develop or try to expand their own capabilities.
It’s impossible to talk about The Electric Stars without mentioning their influences, and the band wears them on their sleeve. Velvet Elvis is a sprawling work that clearly takes lessons from the 60s and 70s. The album opener, “Velvet Elvis” showcases the band’s love of The Rolling Stones, and I mean everything the Stones did. So not only does the album begin with either a Hammond or Farfisa organ, quite a statement, but its first track clearly relishes in building upon the kind of stylistic variations the Stones played their hands at from the late 60s to the end of the 70s. There’s the conga-dominated percussion recalling Beggars Banquet, a choir utilized in a similar way to the standout tracks of Let It Bleed, some psychedelic forays reminiscent of Satanic Majesties, bluesy soloing akin to highlights from Sticky Fingers and Exile, and this is just the 1st track. The Electric Stars here only stop short of emulating the disco-tinges of Emotional Rescue, but who knows what they’ll pull of with their next album.
This isn’t to say the band is revisiting the past or has nothing original to say. The entirety of the album follows the character of Velvet Elvis, who was a central figure in Sonic Candy Soul. Our lad has begun to have a hard time dealing with life in the public eye, although this isn’t necessarily a concept album. There is, however, a lot of commentary on the commercial music industry, as in the song “Pop Star,” which takes aim at the assembly-line nature of disposable stardom that shows like The X-Factor have normalized. Justifiably so, the song doesn’t even pull punches with the pop stars themselves, who by now know full well what they’re getting into, as we’ve heard stories for decades now. Yet, for an album with some fairly dark lyrical content, a lot of the tracks have a very pointedly upbeat instrumentation, and the next thing you know you’ll be bopping to a song about record label executives planning on undermining their signed talent by licensing songs for underwear ads. Where else can you get that kind of tragicomedy in song form?
As much as I want to write in detail about every song, I’m loathe to spoil someone else’s first listen. That said, the album is full of surprising musical turns. Piano-driven balladry leads “I Left My Soul Out in the Rain” after the psychedelia-heavy and jangly sunny tunes “Precious” and “The Only Lover Left Alive” give way to the acoustic downer “Loaded With Regrets” and somehow, all this works. Maybe because the character of Velvet Elvis is the common link, although it doesn’t seem he is the explicit subject of every song. Still, for a work that has this much to say about fame, commercialism poisoning art, and a fictional character’s encounters with fame and commercialism, it’s remarkable that 12 songs over 1 hour and 2 minutes are all coherent statements that never lose their edge.
The Electric Stars could have easily retread the same Hendrix, Clapton, Beatles, etc. ground that other retro-inspired bands do, but the Stars decided they were going to bulldoze a portion of that ground and plant new seeds. That’s a remarkable achievement, I’d say.
5/5
The Seeming and the Meaning 
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