STARSET – VESSELS Music Review

Jonathan Mackie

Starset’s sophomore effort Vessels came out recently on January 20, 2017 and reached number 11 on Billboard’s top 200 albums chart.

Starset is relatively new to the music world, bursting into the hard rock scene in 2013.

They are a very unique and ambitious band, whose profound interest in astronomy finds its way into the lyrics of their songs thanks to the lead singer’s electrical engineering PhD.

They also sound quite different from most bands in the hard rock genre because instead of just simple power cords, Starset like to incorporate progressive, electric and symphonic themes into their music.

They’ve only released one other album ever, Transmissions in 2014, which had moderate success and saw a top 5 single in “My Demons.”

Before my viewing of Vessels, I heard the single “Monster” which was released in December as a preview to the album and after a few times listening to it, I am pleased to say that I was very impressed with the tune and I now consider it one of my favorite songs by the band.

For the rest of the album, I personally thought the introduction fell flat because I prefer a fast paced, upbeat track to open a hard rock album.

Once it got out of the gates though, it started to pick up and I liked what I was hearing with a similar sounding spaced themed joyride that was sounding close to Transmissions, which is a good thing.

Some of my favorite tracks were “Satellite,” “Frequency,” “Into the Unknown,” “Back to the Earth,” and of course “Monster.”

I wouldn’t say there were any bad songs in the album specifically (except for the opener, “The Order”) but with Transmissions having a lot of really memorable songs, it brings this album down a little because it didn’t improve on the success of the prior singles even though the album charted higher.

I give it a 3 out of 5