When Stardeath and White Dwarfs ringleader Dennis Coyne was asked how he would describe his band’s debut LP, named fittingly “The Birth,” he answered leisurely in a Southern-meets-Midwest accent that is purely Oklahoman: “Um, I would say sonically assaulting. It’ll give you a contact high just listening.”

Stardeath and White Dwarfs formed about five years ago, when its youngest member, bassist and keyboardist Casey Joseph, was just 15 years old.

“We started playing music together, and we’d go through members here and there,” Coyne said as a dog barked in the background. “It’s taken awhile to get to this lineup.

The group’s current incarnation includes Coyne and Joseph, as well as Matt Duckworth, who was working in the office of the band’s manager, and guitarist James Young, who was dating a friend of a friend.

Obvious musical parallels to The Flaming Lips hit hard by the second track on “The Birth,” starting with falsetto harmonies leading into light, fuzzy guitar work and all those little squeaks, whirls and quirks listeners have come to expect from The Lips.

And it is notable that, apart from Dennis Coyne being the nephew of seminal neo-psych space rocker, Flaming Lips front man, Dennis Coyne, Stardeath and White Dwarfs have opened for The Lips, rocked along with The Lips in a communal cover of “Borderline,” a spacey take on Madonna’s fourth ever single and grown up admiring one of Oklahoma’s biggest success stories, to some, exceeding the prowess of Hanson.

“I’ve always been a Lips fan,” Coyne said. “When you see a band of that caliber working so hard, that’s the biggest impact.”

“I Can’t Get Away” opens with big ’90s drums and proceeds to totally rock out as the absolute best-suited song to turn people on to Stardeath. The chorus filled with do do-do do’s is just catchy enough and just edgy enough to not terrify the average listener.

Coyne’s favorite song from “This Birth” is currently “Age of The Freak,” which features Coyne trading in his usual electric for some acoustic strumming and boasts expansive progressions from minimalism into big drum rolls and Lennon-esque echoes.

“Age of The Freak” is one of the most recently penned songs, and after assembling songs for this record over the past five years, Coyne said he tends to like Stardeath’s newest songs most.

The title track is a slow-paced and eerie, with creaky doors and baby wailing. “Love can be heavy / If you / You’re not ready,” Coyne sings.
“The Birth” sounds like Stardeath’s extension of “Blue Jay Way.”

It leads into one of the most interesting tracks, the all-instrumental “Those Who Are From The Sun Return To The Sun.” With jazz freak outs and a wicked bassline, Stardeath and White Dwarfs exhibit that they can do without the tangles of lyrics mangling the intricate sounds they produce instrumentally.

It is impossible not to mention the closing track, if just for its title.

“Smokin’ Pot Makes Me Not Want to Kill Myself” has to be one of the most straightforward names ever dubbed on a song. What’s more is that it seems to be one of the most heartfelt of the bunch.

When Coyne sings “And it’s not in your mind / And we’re not wasting each other’s time,” it’s as sad as it is sweet.

While The Lips has unavoidably influenced Stardeath, Coyne said that hip-hop and rap were major influences on him as he was growing up and one of his favorite groups is OutKast.

There is no rapping to be found on “The Birth,” but there is definitely a band with the potential to grow into something big.

Stardeath and White Dwarfs showed their scope of musical interests on their debut record and can only hone their talents in time.

Recommended If You Dig: The Flaming Lips, MGMT, Klaxons

Reach the reporter at rebecca.bartkowski@asu.edu