Little Star's Second Album Turns Pain into Pop

Little Star, Little Star (Good Cheer)

[MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY] On his band's self-titled sophomore effort, Little Star singer Daniel Byers has learned an important lesson: You can vent about your own misery ad nauseam, so long as you dress your existential dilemma in pop hooks to keep the kids dancing. Evolving past the first album's cherry-picked pastiche of various indie elements, Little Star moves toward a retro jubilance that's difficult to pigeonhole by genre. The band's busy, manipulated sonic assemblage evokes the Cure in pop mode, and lays the foundation for Byers to speak plainly and candidly about some pretty dark personal situations.

Little Star opens with a pair of angular laments about coping with depression. While Robert Smith uses metaphor to describe the depths of his suffering, Byers comes clean in such casual vernacular that you can't help but admire his sincerity. "My life is empty and useless without you in it," he croons on "Mood," going so far as to name Zoloft as the subject of his conflicted feelings. Lines like "I feel so down/I wonder if there could be any way out" are awfully doomy, but backed by a cool breeze of skittish, jazzy percussion and flanged New Wave, you hardly notice that he's debating the pros and cons of suicide.

Related: "Best New Band 2016: Little Star."

Another pair of tunes, both called "Calming Ritual," zoom in on the actual day-to-day elements of living with mental health issues. Byers observes the world around him in a passive tone, everything outside himself existing on the periphery of his neurosis. People drive alongside him on the highway and move around him, in and out of his field of interaction, but he remains an observer, interjecting every so often to remind himself about life's inevitable evolution. His relationship ends. He relates his state to Linda Blair in The Exorcist. He paints his heartbreak in delicate strokes of neon shades that force a vibrancy on otherwise woeful environs. He screams a little bit over guitars way too manipulated to relate his frustration.

But the dichotomy of Little Star's dark subject matter and bright instrumentation is the source of their success. The same way Byers can't do much but take a walk or watch a movie on the days his disease gets the best of him, he can't mine someone else's suffering for material and mean it. So he does his best, considers the world around him, and shoves the worst of it through his pedalboard to make it better—forcing his pain to evolve into pop. 

SEE IT: Little Star plays Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., with Oh Rose and Blackwater (Holylight), on Friday, April 14. 9 pm. $5. 21+.