by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

There was a time when self-appointed wise men predicted the outcome of events, for good or ill, based on the position of the stars in the night sky. Of course, they augured stuff by poking around in crow guts too, so that's how much they knew.

Still, the stars may well have been in some sort of beneficial alignment, artistic if not economic, just about 10 years ago. In 1994, locals Bob Eaglesham and Ricky Rigby, the duo at the heart of Shine Like Stars!, gave themselves a mission: "Let's make the sweetest, catchiest pop that we can possibly make," as Eaglesham puts it, "for no reason other than, why not?

"I'm always reading biographies of musicians and how things progressed for them, the whole thing about being at the right place at the right time. When I look back on what was going on when we did all this stuff, it was one of those times. The situation couldn't have been more perfect. We were both living in Châteauguay at the time, Rick had broken up with his girlfriend and I'd just been divorced, I had a car and a 9-to-5 joe job, so I was making some money. Also at that time, I was just getting into experimentation with marijuana - neither of us had smoked it before that. Basically, my mind completely opened up. Obviously, music had a whole new dimension."

Stupefied in the studio

Exploring that dimension brought them to Lost Rock - a big lump of stone in plain view of both of their former elementary schools, from which the title of their "new" album on the Robosapien label is taken (Lost Rock collects the most polished of the '94-'95 SLS! recordings). "We had our whole ritual, the whole thing about Lost Rock. We'd go there half an hour before sunset, smoke our joint and talk while the sun set. Then we'd go back and record ideas. We'd do this almost every night. Then, every weekend, Rick's parents would go away to their place in Vermont, so Rick's whole house became our studio, with a pool and barbecue and everything. You can't get much better than that. We were completely free, there was no pressure, no nothing - a total creative environment."

This serendipity carried through to the musical landscape of the time. Grunge was giving way to the ascendance of hip hop, techno and their offshoots, and to lo-fi DIY as the chic new aesthetic. SLS! took what they needed and cobbled it all together for the premium price of "a box of cassettes and however much herb we smoked."

Take "Older," a stand-out track on the disc with its friendly D&B beat, jangly guitar strum and unshakable call-and-response chorus: "What do you wanna do when you're older? I wanna be high!"

"That song's kind of a masterpiece of our lo-fi-ness," says Rigby. "It all started with an underlying rhythm from a beatbox that we'd bought in Chinatown, then Bob played guitar to that. Then we said, ‘You know, this needs something else, another beat.' So we took the drum machine and manually synced up the drum & bass type beat to that - no sequencers, computers or anything.

"We then got a chorus of my brother's 11-year-old friends to come in and sing ‘I wanna be high.' At first we tried to get them to shut up between the choruses - ‘Just sing when you're supposed to.' Then we gave up and said, ‘Go crazy and make as much noise as you can.'"

Musical comfort food

While songs like "Older" languished in a shoebox on someone's closet shelf for a decade rather than burning up the charts, it's not that SLS! didn't at least try to take it up a notch. A collab with Montreal's Zoobone Studios failed to produce the mach-two batch of SLS! tracks (though it did lead to an assist on Bran Van 3000's Glee). But then, maybe humble and handmade is where they always wanted to be. Their plans for the Robosapien retrospective are limited to the familiar just-get-it-out-there strategy: play some shows, don't sweat the finances, do it mainly (if not exclusively) for the audience's enjoyment.

"A song like ‘Older,' whether it's a million-dollar production or it costs 50 cents for the cassette we record it on," says Eaglesham, "it'll still be good. The meat and potatoes part of the music - the hooks, the rhythm, the lyrics - are there."

"The thing I found surprising," adds Rigby, "was that after listening to it again, the music didn't sound dated at all. There are production values you could talk about, but the songs themselves are timeless."

CD launch at Casa del Popolo tonight, Thursday, Dec. 18, 9pm, $5

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