Give me back my guitar

I am an unreserved admirer of Mestar. Their records are sublime and live they never fail to please - they played last weekend at the Cross here in Wellington and I was in heaven. No other band I know can hit ya with those power-pop sucker-punches again and again and again and you get back to your feet grinning and clamouring for another smack. No one else has ever even come close to being able to consistently lay-on such twee little bundles of gift-basket whimsy without provoking any kind of gag reflex. No other band I can think of can time and time again wrap up a song by the bottom of the third minute and you know everything that was ever there to be said has been said and so shut up end-of-discussion. No other band I can think of can play a long set where every song sounds the same but not in any bad sense... in the sense that the band's sound and essence is so refined and assured and the moves they make are so within their own self-defined parameters that they leave you peering with magnifying lens at the songs for the minutae of detail that act as beacons along the way. No other band I know can string together a sequence of tracks on an LP like Mestar has on Porcupine, their most recent album - Distant Star, Jitter, Ovientar and so on - each of which just effortlessly falls into the lap of the next and you're sitting listening with a huge grin on your face wondering at the glorious beauty of it all and you can't sit still 'cos you really want to be singing and pogoing with your head up amongst the light fittings... well to be honest the first side of the Buzzcocks Singles Going Steady is comparable but that's a compilation, dig, a whole diff'rent story...

Actually it's a bit rich claiming to be such a huge fan since I only own Porcupine but this is a situation I am in the process of remedying. I also have the John White (Mestar's enigmatic frontman) solo CD Balloon Adventure. It's definitely the same guy - the same delightfully wide-eyed irony-free fairy-tales and fables - but the production is pared back and there's a big ol' ambient-orchestral-electonics drift track on the end which is just the ticket when you've put the CD on to go to sleep by. Big news is there's a new John White solo CD on the way... watch this space, huh?

The Mestar site is here; click on the big porcupine and you're in.