Nine minutes and thirty-four seconds. That is the entire bill for ‘Take Shape,’ and Xanny Stars spend it like people who suspect the room is about to empty. Four compact songs pressed to a 7-inch is all the space this trio needs. Cleveland’s self-appointed most anxious band has made a small, urgent object, the kind meant to be flipped over rather than filed away.
Concision is a bet, and a risky one. A song that stops near the two minute mark has no room to bluff. “Leo” has to land in the time it takes to reheat leftovers, and so do “Honey,” “Take A Breath,” and “See Right Through.” The trio plays like a band that knows it. Allie Mattis (guitar and vocals), Mickey Mocnik (bass and vocals), and Sam Gottsegen (drums and vocals), share the load and it matters. Plenty of bands in this lane hand the microphone to one person and ask everyone else to hold steady. Here, three voices stack and lean on each other.
The guitars sets the terms right away. Nobody fussed over these guitars, and it shows. The tone’s pop punk and garage rock lineage is loud and a little rude, every rough edge still sitting where it landed. Once the vocal melodies come in, the whole mood shifts and almost brightens. Those layered harmonies are power pop through and through, sweet and springy, and they turn the clatter into something closer to a welcome. It’s a bit like light finding its way into a cluttered garage. The noise doesn’t go anywhere, but it stops feeling like a warning and starts sounding like an invitation. On paper, the two should fight. In practice they take turns. A scruffy riff makes room for a chorus sweet enough to hum on the walk home, and the sweetness makes the scruff sound even better, and the scruff keeps the sweetness from going soft. That pairing is the record’s whole personality: a band that sounds like it is having fun while describing something that hurts.
Because the hurt is real. “See Right Through” is a song about wanting someone more than they want you back, and it admits as much without flinching. The narrator lives on scraps: a look across the room, a casual like, anything that can be stretched into a meal. Worse, there’s a quiet hope that a friend lands in some kind of trouble, purely so there’s a reason to show up and help. Funny, and a tad mortifying, the track will hit hard for anyone who has ever adored someone from a safe distance. Does the object of all that devotion truly sees the narrator or simply looks through them? Nobody gets rescued. The narrator just stays put, still hoping to be noticed.Two and a half minutes. That’s all it takes for the narrator to get picked apart, piece by piece, with no mercy at all. The harmonies keep bouncing along all the while, grinning, which only makes the words land harder.
The Midwestern thread running through the credits matches the band’s own geography with Jerome Westerkamp recording and mixing at the Checkered Flag in Cincinnati and John Hoffman putting the finishing touches on the mastering at The Lodge in Dayton, Kentucky. This is a record made close to home, by people who know the kinds of rooms it will be played in, and it keeps that scale without apologizing for it.
At its best, pop punk is a secret spilled in one breath, all nerves and no brakes. ‘Take Shape’ trusts that instinct. The title suggests a project still hardening, an outline waiting to fill in, and the band’s habit of releasing 7-inches in quick succession (this is the second in as many years) points to a group that prefers to work out its identity in public, one tight statement at a time.
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