Starbound is not blessed with articulate, subtle artwork. It’s also a record marked with curious dichotomies.
Starbound is a testament to sharp, direct song-writing which doesn’t mess around with atmosphere, technicality or tone. It represents the sweet, sweet sound of leotards, headbands and positivity, resulting in a record that feels half as long as it’s 39 minutes. There’s nothing here which is shocking or novel, but it’s neatly, compellingly executed. 3 verses, 3 choruses, vocal harmonization, guitar solos and underlying keyboard melodies are all that’s required by each track to forge the album. 2 Its surprisingly nifty leads, huge choruses and confident vocal harmonies land it close to those Sheffielders. Starbound falls into that nebulous crossover of glam metal, album-oriented rock and hard rock, sounding closer to Pyromania-era Leppard than anything else. There were dozens of bands in the 80s doing almost exactly what’s done here. In the intervening 3 decades, such listeners scarcely strayed from their pre-90s tastes 1 This means that bands like Osukaru struggle to escape obscurity – but miss this at your peril.
The target demographic of their sixth release, Starbound, stopped listening to new music in 1992 with the last good Def Leppard record, the stratification of a variety of extreme metal sub-genres and the advent of grunge as the most popular form of rock. In the case of Sweden’s Osukaru, I suspect it may be a consequence of their style. It usually signifies a group toiling in mediocrity, never having sufficiently impressed a critical mass to start developing a reputation. Alarm bells tend to ring when, after randomly picked an album for review, that album is one of several for a band you’ve never heard previously.
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