Gringo Star | Count Yer Lucky Stars

The Atlanta group faceplants on their forgettable sophomore LP.

Most likely to: Oh hey guy, what’s up? Oh yeah? No shit! Hahahaha, that’s fucking awesome. Yup. That’s what she said! Hold on a second dude, I’ll be back in a minute, I gotta go grab a smoke, tonight’s been fucking nuts…YOU KNOW! HAHAAAAAA YEAH YOU KNOWUDIMTAWKINABOUT!!!!

(Pro Tip : You just smoked before you ran into each other. You most certainly won’t be right back.)

Gringo Star’s Count Yer Lucky Stars is fine. But really, nobody’s going to give a shit in a few years. I really hope that nobody reading this knew them from their basement inception, lovingly following them from the shit-tier open-mic proving grounds to the upper middle class ranch house of indie rock that is Kung-Fu Necktie, and hedging their aesthetic bets on the band releasing the next De Stijl or something, because that shit ain’t ne’er gonna happen, bruh. You’ve seriously wasted your youth on this one. I’m wasting my time listening to this pap as I write this.

Not that Count Yer Lucky Stars is offensive, not that it’s the Lulu of neo-garage-psychedelia or whatever the fuck genre they think they’re taking a stab at—it’s just boring as shit. Believe me, I tried, but there’s no real condition under which someone could listen to this and actually feel anything. You know, there was a study that came out recently that made the claim that music releases the same chemicals and tingles the same receptors in the brain as sex. So if we can equate music to sex, we can equate the song “Exit” by R. Kelly with the half-drunk, magic snap kisses you exchange with the smart girl with the fat ass outside the club in the stoop of a long-closed pizza shop across the street somewhere in the northeast. A step further, we can equate the intro to Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming to exotic honeymoon sex in the middle of the night on a rooftop in Belgium as the city beneath blankets our bodies/souls with stars. Now, with these precedents established, we can define Count Yer Lucky Stars in sexual metaphors as being representative of the girl at the party who is a 5.5 at best, scary/sad drunk and fuckable purely by virtue of the fact that it’s been a while and, well, she’s just kind of…there.

That’s never a route I’ve been proud of, but it happens. It has its place in the great canopy of lifetime experience. That is, all it has a place, with no real relevance to the whole but with just enough substance to connect the greater experiences that come before and after. So, while Gringo Star are now a part of the mental connective tissue being developed at this particular moment in my life, I will undoubtedly drink until that tissue atrophies and dies, and I’ll be glad that nothing of value was lost.

To conclude: my editors will probably include some sort of link to one of the many boring and forgettable nuggets of whitewashed, 1%er, troubadork gayrage rock that comprises the entirety of Count Yer Lucky Stars. In an effort to subvert their authority and give you, the discerning reader, something to counteract the poison, I present to you the R. Kelly song mentioned earlier in the review. Enjoy.

Listen to “Shadow” by Gringo Star:

[audio:http://godonnybrook.com/v3/wp-content/themes/mimbo2.2/images/01-Shadow.mp3|artists=Gringo Star|titles=Shadow]