Music Review // STAHR "BLIP" (EP)

  Following the release of their single "Mother Aura" (which happens to be the first song on this five song EP) STAHR are keeping it rocking with this new EP titled "BLIP".   With these guitar-fuzzy, start and stop guitar chords, STAHR brings the rocking in a way a lot of bands just don't seem to do these days.  It's not quite that era of Lit and Shades Apart (who I saw tour together once upon a time) but it's just that sound where you feel like it isn't heavy enough to be metal, but it's too heavy to just be rock.

STAHR is the duo of Grace Harris and Samuel Shepherd.  This is worth noting because Harris has lead vocals on "Mother Aura" and "Isn't It Fun?" but Shepherd takes over the lead vocal duties on the other songs.  If you had only heard "Mother Aura" before this, you might think Grace Harris just does all the vocals, so that is worth noting.  It's especially interesting as Shepherd takes the lead for "Be The Light", which is an acoustic ballad in the way that you might feel resembles Puddle of Mudd or an "alternative" rock band of that sort but not quite that exact sound either.

Not just because of the lyrics on "Be The Light" but because of the overall vibe to this EP I think there is something spiritual happening here.  I always think music is spiritual on some level because music just needs to have a soul, but it's not really religious in the way that the lyrics are directly about that.  This sound just feels like something adjacent to Switchfoot, for example, though maybe not even exactly like that either.

On some grand, overall level to this EP, I just think about what rock music was like before grunge came and sort of took away the big hair bands.  I in no way believe that STAHR is a big hair band, but they have that same sort of formula for their music in ways and had grunge not been there to take the front, perhaps this type of rock would have been an evolution from big hair to just rocking guitar solo fun.