Stargazing & Shoegazing with "Antares" by Stella Luna
Stargazing & Shoegazing with "Antares" by Stella Luna
Drumming Upstream 29
Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 450 songs to go!
This week I learned how to play “Antares” by the shoegaze band Stella Luna. “Who is that?” you may ask. Great question! I don’t know! In fact, no one does. We’ll get into how I came to add a completely unknown band to my Liked list in the letter below.
Now, let’s go star gazing.
Side A
“Antares”
By Stella Luna
Stargazer
Released on July 16th, 2002
Liked on December 2nd, 2015
Who are Stella Luna?
I cannot promise you an answer to that question, but in order to get anywhere close we have to answer a different question first.
What is shoegaze?
On March 17th, 2023 the quiz show Jeopardy posed the answer to that question to its contestants as follows: “This dreamy style of British indie rock got its name from the way performers stared at their effects pedals”. The image of this answer, framed in Jeopardy’s iconic white-on-blue square, quickly made the rounds on Indie Rock social media, usually with an aww-shucks bashfulness, as if to say “isn’t it funny that we’ve made it this far?” To be fair, appearing on Jeopardy is a milestone for a niche interest, not quite Weird Al including your song in a polka, but a step in the right direction toward mainstream awareness. There may be no better summary of shoegaze’s popularity than its presence on Jeopardy. It is a genre that by its very definition does not make many forward overtures, but is readily accessible from enough points of entry to make it conceivably common knowledge.
If you’re in my age bracket (early 30s) you might have first come across the genre in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, which features the song “Sometimes” by the band My Bloody Valentine, deployed with military precision over footage of Scarlet Johansson gazing up through the window of a taxi at nocturnal Tokyo. Maybe instead you heard about the French band M83 from a webcomic1 and, taken with their massive, pillow-soft approach to synth pop, and worked your way back to their points of reference. In either case, to a narrow strip of millennials shoegaze was firmly the music of hipsters past, a micro-genre that collapsed under the weight of its own pedal-board in the early 1990s, leaving behind a handful of classic records and a blueprint for future musicians looking to yearn at ear-splitting volumes.
That blueprint came in real handy a decade later when, in accordance to the iron-clad law of the twenty year cycle, early 90s indie rock roared back into vogue. With two decades of lead time to proliferate across borders geographic and subcultural, the hallmarks of shoegaze started cropping up in the hands not just of fresh-faced indie rockers, but metalheads and former emo musicians as well. In the early 2010s shoegaze ceased to be a distinct genre, if it ever truly was one to begin with, and instead became one tool among many. Any band that knew the right gear to buy could inject as much or as little of the style’s woozy, hazy charm into a song as they needed.
Shoegaze was just one of many micro-genres popular in this era that prized soft edges, obfuscation, a kind of sonic illegibility. We’ve already covered the part that chillwave played in this aesthetic shift (see DU #9), as well as the early stages of what by the end of the decade would be known as “blackgaze” (see DU #16). These two sat alongside shoegaze proper, cloud rap, dream pop, ambient, and the concurrently resurgent doom metal in the ice cream shop of early 2010s music, all offering variations on sweet, formless relief. In 2002, a year before Lost in Translation hit the screen, the confections on offer in indie music had a different flavor profile. This was an era of coke-fueled post-punk cosplay and painfully sincere Canadians with too many instruments2. An era of sharp angles and high saturation miles removed from the blur of shoegaze. And yet, no genre is ever truly dead. Of course there were bands still hunched over their Fender Jazzmasters and whispering sweet nothings, even if no one wanted to hear them anymore. Which brings us to Stella Luna and their song "Antares".
History has proven that no one wanted to hear Stella Luna. The band (consisting of Susan Hanson, Devon Smith, Rhonda Roberts, Darin Fitzpatrick, and Jennifer Sterling) formed in 1996 in Jacksonville, FL. They released exactly one EP, 2002’s Stargazer and then vanished off the face of the earth. None of the members of the band have resurfaced in any other bands since. Beyond the four songs on Stargazer the only material attributed to Stella Luna is a YouTube video that alleges to be a live recording of an unreleased song of theirs. They have made, as far as I can tell, no cultural impact in the 20 years since they released Stargazer. No legacy as a hidden gem, no one clamoring for a reissue and no reunion.
This is especially remarkable because shoegaze is a genre tailor-made for obsessives. Shoegaze fans love to dig for obscure, short lived practitioners. When the flagship bands of the genre only released a few albums each, maybe this tendency for celebrating potential energy is inevitable. And yet when I informally polled my friends, only two out of the eighteen self-described shoegaze fans had even heard of Stella Luna. That may seem like a negligibly small sample size, but look at what you’re reading and extrapolate. My friends over-index for musicians, music industry professionals, and music obsessives. If only two of those dorks had heard of Stella Luna, let alone actually heard them, what hope does the rest of the population have?
So, how is it that I had not only heard of Stella Luna in 2015 but enjoyed hearing them enough to add “Antares” to my Liked list? Here I must give the devil its due. I heard of Stella Luna through Spotify. I was not immune to the charm of shoegaze in the early half of the decade. I too had a sweet tooth for the style. By 2014 I was a big enough fan of the genre to experience genuine excitement when Slowdive3 were announced for Pitchfork Fest 2014 and felt genuine catharsis when I watched them roar into “When The Sun Hits” with golden hour light streaming over Union Park on a beautiful late July day. I gobbled up every metal album that followed in Alcest’s footsteps, scoring nearly every summer since 2013 with Deafheaven4 the minute the temperature breaks 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Spotify clearly picked up on this and began slipping shoegaze tracks in my personalized playlists, which by 2015 I still enjoyed using as a matter of intellectual curiosity. One of those songs was "Antares".
You may have noticed that I did not Like “Antares” in the summer. Instead I Liked it in December, in Chicago, which is a version of December substantially more hostile than other Decembers. This seasonal distinction explains why and what I Liked about “Antares”. Different seasons bring out different qualities of shoegaze. The summer highlights the genre’s romantic side. The guitars swoon, notes lilting under the heat. The music’s volume suggests an intensity of feeling, while the softness of the vocals clarifies the intimacy of that feeling. Summer shoegaze is the shoegaze of yearning, of being lost in the moment, of being wistful only because of how beautiful the moment is before it vanishes. If a young man listening to shoegaze in the summer is in love, then the young man listening to shoegaze in the winter is crying out for help. In the cold shoegaze feels distant, walled off into itself. It encourages disengagement, a retreat into the oblivion of vibes.
I can only speculate as to the arcane math that led Spotify to pick “Antares” out of history’s dust bin and put it on a black and green platter for me that night, but the timing couldn’t have been better. When I Liked “Antares” I was circling the Loop at the Brown line’s agonizing slow pace, the world on the other side of the glass cold and dark, punctuated only by the distant lights of empty office buildings. My insides felt just as hollowed out. The romance that Slowdive had scored the summer before was a fresh memory and a painful one still. I was a few months into a year-and-a-half break from drinking. I knew I was too sad to risk drowning my sorrows. I should have known that I was also too sad for shoegaze, but when the descending melody that starts “Antares” hit me all I could do was submit and descend with it.
“Antares”, the third track on Stella Luna sole EP Stargazer, is the longest, slowest, and saddest song in the band’s brief catalog. In keeping with their outer space theme, the song’s lyrics compare the feeling of missing someone to drifting through the 500-some lightyears between Earth and the far off star Antares. “Riding on a solar wind”, Devon Smith whispers against the swell of guitars in the chorus, “no one will remember me”. Smith reaches for the same romantic yearning that defines the sunnier side of shoegaze, but against the downcast tone of his bandmates he can’t help but come across as hopeless. “Hurry up before its gone, you take too long” he sings near the end of the song’s eight minutes, itself a sign of how long Smith is willing to wait in desperation.
This trip into oblivion shares a rough outline with the kind of annihilation that we’ve covered before with Washed Out, Alcest, and Isis. However, changing the setting from the ocean to deep space makes all the difference. Space shares none of the ocean’s duality, none of its ability to give or rejuvenate life. It doesn’t offer ecstasy or release, just an endless, lonely void. No wonder drifting through space has served as a metaphor for depression in media ranging from Japanese role-playing games to star-studded Hollywood thrillers5. There’s no more extreme way to depict feeling isolated and helpless than to fire a single human being into the gap between worlds.
For eight minutes, “Antares” reflected back to me the cold, lonely feeling I was using shoegaze to numb. It didn’t sweeten my sadness into wist. Instead it let me float from one long verse to another with only snatches of distant radio chatter to connect me back to earth. The indecipherable samples scattered throughout are fractals of the song itself. “Antares” is a message from a long lost source, a yearning out of and into the void. By impossible chance it reached me at the exact moment when my own frequency dipped into its range. But “Antares” does have a source. Even if we may never know who made the song, we can learn something from how they made it.
Side B
“Antares”
Performed by Darin Fitzpatrick
63-65 BPM
Time Signature: 4/4
When I started learning “Antares” I tried, as I always do, to track down information about the drummer responsible for the part that I had to play. No dice. I did find a Darin Fitzpatrick who plays drums, but from the looks of it he only plays heavy metal. If that metal drummer got his start playing shoegaze 20 years earlier, he’s made no effort to connect the two phases of his life. Maybe he’s embarrassed, maybe he’s moved on, or maybe he’s a different guy altogether. The drums on “Antares” don’t give us much to work with either. Fitzpatrick is near the bottom of the mix, his drums shaved into thin clicks and washed out with delay. His part is simple, rudimentary enough that for a long time I wondered whether it was the result of a cheap drum machine and not a human. Fitzpatrick’s only signs of life come in the song’s two choruses. To match the distorted guitar riff that distinguishes the chorus from the verse, Fitzpatrick switches from a cross stick to a full snare drum and plays an extra kick drum on beat four. This gives the chorus a lurching quality, like the whole song is suspended in air briefly before crashing back down to the ground.
Shoegaze doesn’t ask much of its drummers. Loveless may start with an iconic drum fill (DATDATDATDAT) but it is the riff that follows that makes the fill iconic in the first place. The genre’s real priority is right there in the name. A guitarist staring at their feet is managing a complex web of effects. A drummer staring at their feet is probably practicing something far too exciting to fit in shoegaze’s languid dreamscape. There are exceptions of course (Ride fans shout me out in the comments), but de-emphasizing the drums is a big part of the style. Drums and percussion make music feel grounded and embodied in a physical reality. Pushing the drums to the background lets the music take on a heady, disembodied, ethereal quality.
And boy did Stella Luna take “ethereal” and run with it as far as they could go. “Antares” is two sections built on two chords stretched to eight minutes; a pair of verses and choruses bracketed by an instrumental verse at the beginning and end of the song. Stella Luna play the song slow enough for a verse to last a full minute. By the end of the first chorus most songs would be heading to the exit, but Stella Luna only start up the cycle again. This is part of what makes the song so depressing, just when you think you’ve found a way out you’re back where you started at the bottom of the pit again. The repetition also, frankly, makes the song boring to play on drums.
There’s a concept that video game critic Tim Rogers likes to mention called the “I Get It” button. The idea is that once the primary challenge of a particular level or boss becomes how boring it is to solve, you should be allowed to hit the “I Get It” button and move on to the next, hopefully more entertaining, challenge. If you watch my cover closely, you can see my eyes scan the room for the “I Get It” button’s musical equivalent about halfway through the second verse. Once I got used to the awkward, lurching pace of the chorus I’d learned pretty much everything there was to learn about Fitzpatrick’s drum part. Crashing into that chorus is a lot of fun the first few times you do it. It’s always fun to change dynamics! But when every chorus is nestled between two instrumental versions of the same riff the thrill is too over-exposued to endure.
That same is true for “Antares” as a whole.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
“Antares” faces an uphill battle in my esteem these days. The funk I was in when I Liked the song in December of 2015 didn’t last to see the next winter. It didn’t take long for the song to feel a little embarrassing any time it came up on shuffle, the way any artifact of post-breakup wallowing feels once you’re back on your feet. The song’s length doesn’t do it any favors either. Do both choruses need two instrumental repetitions? Does the song need to return to the instrumental verse one last time after the second chorus? Trimming the song down to a more reasonable six minutes wouldn’t have made it any less powerful an evocation of the sadness at its core, but it would make it easier to listen to casually. Stella Luna make their repetition work by piling on a lot of effects so that each note can trail off into a constantly shimmering background texture. It takes them pretty far, but not 500-some lightyears far.
Still, despite its structural flaws and the unbecoming memories it dredges up, I am fond of the song. I find it fascinating that Spotify recommended me a piece of music that provably none of my friends could have recommended. Stargazer is a really cool EP, and a much more upbeat listen than “Antares” alone implies. I’m charmed by the image of this band from Florida a decade late to the shoegaze party plugging away in obscurity, only to arrive on my doorstep 13 years later. When the shoegaze fans I polled about Stella Luna asked if they should check the band out, I universally said yes. They’re a cool band! It’d be cool if more shoegaze fans knew about them.
Just… maybe start with a different song.
For now “Antares” will rest at 26th, just beneath “Constant Headache” (DU #3) and above “Vessels” (DU #23) on the Leaderboard. The further we get into this project the more “Constant Headache” hardens into the dividing line between stuff I still like and stuff that hasn’t aged well. You want into the winner’s circle? You gotta get past the pop punk bouncer first.
I don’t know about you, but I had a lot of fun writing a letter that didn’t require much in the way of fresh research. I liked it so much that I’m going to do the same thing for the next entry, this time by covering an artist and album that I’ve researched in advance. Thanks, me from the past!
Thanks for reading, have a good week!
You might recall the Questionable Content recommendations page from DU #10. Isis are one of a handful of bands mentioned on that page to appear in Drumming Upstream. M83, however, will not be one of them.
*sigh* yes, Arcade Fire will still appear in Drumming Upstream. No, I’m not excited to talk about Win Butler.
Slowdive will eventually appear in Drumming Upstream.
Deafheaven will appear in Drumming Upstream several times, which is good because I doubt I’ll be able to say everything I want to say about them in one entry.
The soundtracks to both Final Fantasy VIII and Gravity will appear in Drumming Upstream.