Each month, Consequence places the highlight on an artist who’s poised for the large time with CoSign. For July 2024, that accolade goes to London artist Lava La Rue and their cosmic debut, STARFACE.
Science fiction is beloved for a lot of causes, however a major one is the chances of bending actuality. Ever lament the inflexible binaries of human society? There’s a world ready to be invented, free from these shackles.
The London artist Lava La Rue has no downside world constructing, and their gorgeous sci-fi debut STARFACE is a cosmic odyssey that leans into these gray areas — in gender, style, and species. “In the case of sci-fi, you’ll be able to say something about an alien and folks received’t query it,” Lava tells Consequence over a video name. They’re referring to Starface, a gender-fluid alien who has crash landed on Earth and the protagonist of the album’s journey.
“You can be like, ‘Sure, this alien has no gender’ and no person may very well be like, ‘Properly no, no, in fact it will need to have a gender as a result of…’ Dude, that is an alien! So relating to sci-fi, folks simply settle for the truth that you just give them.”
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With a wealthy combination of funk, psychedelic rock, R&B, and dream pop, STARFACE spans from earthbound to stratospheric, asking huge questions on humanity within the course of. Just like the album’s titular alien, Lava La Rue refuses to be pinned down or relegated to a sure type, as an alternative tinting every music with the identical psychedelic peach-purple hue. Even describing the album’s sound is a hodge podge of concepts — “Funkadelic Britpop” is how Lava hears it.
However beneath all of the dazzling sonic layers, STARFACE is an idea album that lies only some steps away from a sci-fi romance movie. splits the distinction between the David Bowie-starring movie The Man Who Fell to Earth and what Lava refers to as “Lesbian Ziggy Stardust.” The undertaking follows the titular alien Starface who crash lands within the UK, and discovers their true mission: To avoid wasting humanity and cease us from being so self-destructive. In keeping with Lava, nevertheless, Starface “finally ends up changing into a bit self-destructive themself.”
In the meantime, a love triangle blossoms between Starface, a lady, and that lady’s boyfriend (delightfully touched upon in “LOVEBITES”), Lava takes goal at company greed and the “work-til-you-drop” angle as an instance why humanity is struggling (the one-two punch of “CHANGE” and “HUMANITY”), and 17 songs later, we finish with a cliff hanger, with Lava crooning as Starface, “I crashed landed the day we first met/ And noticed the world’s destiny altering/ Do I keep right here?/ Or prevent?”
