Gypsy Death Star

Gypsy Death Star, celebrating the official commercial release of its already critically acclaimed debut, How to Skin a Ghost, performed a set at Billy O’s in Ventura on Saturday night. Having upgraded the live show to match the atmospheric feel of its music with fog, robotic lights and projector effects, Wyatt Hull and Cesar Augusto feel like a polished act, and while no tour plans exist, they are clearly ready for any major U.S. city. Catch them Nov. 12 at Bombay Bar & Grill.

- Ventura County Reporter

After the disbandment earlier this year of one of VC Reporter’s 2009 bands to watch, Cheetahsaurus, frontman Wyatt Hull is back on the scene with his newest collaboration, Gypsy Death Star, which debuted last week at San Souci.

Electronic music composer Cesar Augusto, the essential musical force behind Hull’s signature emotive, howling vocals, dials in much of the down-tempo electronic pulse that drove Cheetahsaurus, without the live instrumentation, focusing the sound into a concentrated beam of trance-inducing energy from the dark side of ambient techno and postpunk/new wave. As the name implies, this power duo probably could actually destroy planets. Catch Gypsy Death Star again at San Souci on Sept. 15.

- Ventura County Reporter

GYPSY DEATH STAR
How to Skin a Ghost
A collection of redemptive breakup songs written by a couple of presumably happily married men. Counterintuitive? Maybe, but vocalist/lyricist and all-around mad genius Wyatt Hull says it’s just the energy he was feeling at the time they were written. The debut EP (with eight tracks, it’s flirting with full-length) by Gypsy Death Star — Hull’s minimalist, post-Cheetahsaurus project — is quickly getting the attention of tastemaker types to the south, and the video for “Werewolf Heart” has gone viral since its release last week. Cesar Augusto’s deliciously creepy synth soundtrack behind Hull’s foreboding, maniacal vocals create an alluring but dangerous chemistry, much like that of the imaginary lovers who have top billing on Ghost. To wit: “You can be the beauty, I’ll be the beast/I wanted to tame you, but I’d settle just for release/you can be the silver bullet in this werewolf heart, show where the beast begins and the man he stops.”

- Ventura County Reporter

If Hurts are like a bunch of eighties boy band wannabe - more Savage Garden than Tears For Fears - then Gypsy Death Star is the real deal.
The alter ego of Wyatt Hull and Cesar Augusto, Gypsy Death Star's sound is somewhere between eighties new romanticism and modern IDM. Album opener 'Throwing Hail Marys' buzzes and sparks with throbbing bass and atmospherics.
'Wax & Wane' turns up twice, once in the form of a slow, ominous ambient piece on the 'WarriorMix' and again, closing the album as the 'Original ix', this time with more of a beat, if only just. 'Heavenly Asylum' is distorted and fractured with a fuzzy melody that veers close to sounding 8bit.
The highlight has to be 'Shake Down', with its distorted guitar picking its way through the intro before the manipulated vocals insist on telling us just how bloody lovely and adorable we are. By the chorus serenade, complete with a lovely 'everybody join-in' "ooh oooooh" bit, it is a wonder the subject of the song was clearly such a bitch. Because if this is anything to go by Gypsy Death Star must be pretty lovely.
And it only works because this unashamedly 'pop' moment stands in isolation on what is otherwise a short and relatively reserved album. How To Skin A Ghost feels very much like an introduction rather than the realisation of all of Gypsy Death Star's ideas and for that we should be grateful.
BP x
- Black Plastic UK