Pushing to the forefront of the shoegaze revival is Chicago three-piece STAR. Combining the warm, hazy, feedback-laden compositions of My Bloody Valentine with The Jesus and Mary Chain's brooding pop, STAR manages to distill what's best about the genre without sounding trite or purely derivative. The relative simplicity of Theodore Beck's programmed beats provides the perfect skeleton for Scott Cortez to wind his droning, recursive feedback loops around. Floating above the din is the steady, serene voice of Shannon Roberts, who relates her bitter tales of control, abuse, and heartbreak so beautifully that it's easy to forget how dark most of the lyrics are.

One of the band's chief assets is the concision of their songs. With only one track breaking the four-minute mark and another eleven that clock in well under three, "Devastator" is a rather brisk listen. Yet despite this brevity, no song seems clipped or unfinished. Each is precisely the right length, and wastes no time in senseless noodling or meandering. The members of STAR prove to be disciples of the "leave-them-wanting-more" school of songwriting, and if only more bands would get on board with this, then perhaps popular music would not be in the lamentable state that it's in today.

Also commendable is STAR's ability to overcome the shoegazer's biggest pitfall-- lack of variety from song to song. STAR peppers "Devastator" with enough memorable hooks and melodic shifts to keep the album from dissolving into a murky, indistinct mess. So the ponderous, gloomy "Switchblade Heart" stands apart from lighter (yet, lyrically, no less pugnacious) "Various Gun Designs." The light percussion and backwards-crawling guitar licks on "Honeysuckers" sounds completely distinct from the three-cord bliss of "No More Party."

"Devastator" is a promising debut from a very talented group of songwriters and noisemakers. The band has recently announced that it is heading into the studio to work on another album. If "Devastator" is any indication of STAR's potential, then we can expect very exciting things for the future.