No mystery

The Secret Stars are a low-key, homespun delight

by Matt Ashare

Last Thursday night at the Lansdowne Street Playhouse, the young, NYC-based singer-songwriter Fiona Apple made her Boston debut in front of a room full of industry types. Apple, a much buzzed-about new Columbia artist who's something of an Alanis Morissette/Tori Amos hybrid, introduced a song with an anecdote about the boy who inspired it. It was a pointless gesture: the song, though pleasant enough, didn't deliver the vivid details and emotional resonances that the story seemed to promise.

A few weeks earlier, in the upstairs room at the Middle East, Geoff Farina, a singer/guitarist who fronts the indie-rock band Karate (that's "Kah-rah-TAY," with the accent on the last syllable, to all you Seinfeld watchers) and moonlights in a low-key duo called the Secret Stars, invited his Secret Stars partner Jodi Buonanno on stage. In front of a crowd that was gathering to see the Olympia sensations Sleater-Kinney, he offered a little story about a cross-country road trip, loneliness, and the song they were about to play. Then, against a spare backdrop of dueling electric guitars, the sketchy details came to life in the form of a simple tune -- "Alienation #3" -- that captured unsettling emotions only hinted at in the story.

The Secret Stars, who play the Middle East tonight (September 26), recorded a disc's worth of songs like that -- including a gorgeously stark version of "Alienation #3" -- last summer on a borrowed four-track. The result, The Secret Stars, was just released by the tiny California-based indie Shrimper, the same label that put out Lou Barlow's Sentridoh home recordings.

The songs on The Secret Stars don't suffer for their low-tech origins. Farina is a sharp, focused guitarist with a ear for tasteful phrasing, like the wistful solo that pierces the melancholy clouds of "Snowday" and the low, twangy, Pete Buck-style countermelody that adds texture and depth to "Alienation #3." Both he and Buonanno, who sings three of the disc's 20 tracks and plays rhythm guitar, have voices that don't need much embellishment and songs that stand on their own.

Like Barlow's Sebadoh, a band who grew out of bedroom recording sessions and the ritual of cassettes passing from friend to friend, the Stars imbue their material with an unselfconscious sense of intimacy. The lyrics can be disarmingly personal. Even without Farina's explanation, listening to "Alienation #3," with its grainy, lovelorn snapshots ("I trip on your laundry, leaving your T-shirt on my floor/I'm wearing it always/It smells like your hair does as you turn fast toward the door") and haunting melody, is a little like paging through a stranger's diary.

Thanks to Lou Barlow and Liz Phair, two of the better-known artists who have released homemade demos, it's no longer unusual for bedroom recordings like The Secret Stars to find their way into the CD racks at Tower. But the Secret Stars are another encouraging reminder that it doesn't take the major-label resources of a Fiona Apple to write, record, and release a great collection of personal songs. n

The Secret Stars play the Middle East this Thursday, September 26.