Album review

Hollywood Porn Stars

Satellites

Paris 

30/08/2007 - 

The Hollywood Porn Stars - a foursome not as their name suggests from Tinseltown but the rather more low-key Liège in Belgium - generated an instant buzz with their well-crafted debut album Year of the Tiger. This overtly rock affair is now followed by a second album, Satellites, which finds HPS tapping into a more melancholy pop vein.

After getting their male friends up on the dancefloor pogo-ing to feisty rock sounds, the Hollywood Porn Stars have decided on a radical change of musical direction, exploring a softer, feminine side on their new album. The band’s new songs, which include Islands, Diamond and Calling the Ghost are infused with world-weary vocals, moody-but-instantly-catchy choruses and sorry tales of unrequited love. And they look set to appeal to hordes of teenage girls pining away in their bedrooms!

Anthony Sinatra, guitarist and lead singer of the Hollywood Porn Stars, knocks out his hits as effortlessly as a doped-up Tour de France cyclist speeding up the Alps. Sinatra makes little effort to hide his musical influences - Coldplay (Crimes) and Queens of the Stone Age (Andy) – and his band could hardly be described as original trailblazers. But the Liège foursome are ruthlessly efficient at what they do best and songs such as The Fugitive and Young Girls will soon be consoling rejected lovers everywhere as they drown their sorrows in their student beer.

The band’s second album, Satellites, was recorded under live conditions in just twelve days, using analogue equipment to "preserve the energy and immediacy of the songs." But somehow the songs on the second album never quite equal the raw energy of the group’s hotly acclaimed debut, although rock impulses do occasionally flash up on Satellites on tracks such as Andy, Walking Cash Machine and There’s God.

It seems that the four members of HPS are saving their madness and eccentricities for their individual projects (Piano Club, My Little Cheap Dictaphone) carried on as offshoots to their Hollywood porn stardom. Meanwhile, Satellites is what it says it is - an accessible mainstream album intended to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. And while Satellites may not go down in music history it should get a fair run in the charts – and that, as they say in this business, ain’t bad at all!

Hollywood Porn Stars Satellites (Naïve) 2007

Ludovic  Basque

Translation : Julie  Street