For some reason, the Jennifer Gentle review in the online version of this week’s CD Reviews appeared with one less star than intended (it’s fixed now). It is, in my estimation, worthy of two stars, rather than just one. Here’s the review:

JENNIFER GENTLE

The Midnight Room

(Sub Pop)

**

Don’t let the name fool you. Jennifer Gentle isn’t some fey female singer-songwriter, but rather five men from Padova, Italy. And they’re not particularly gentle. The name comes from a Syd Barrett lyric, and this band is every bit as strange and psychedelic yet poppy as their sort-of namesake.

For The Midnight Room, the band’s founder and sole songwriter, Marco Fasolo, holed up in his home studio—a house known for its former occupant’s suicide—and wrote, played, and recorded the album in total isolation. The result isn’t so much intimate as it is stir-crazy.

“Twin Ghosts” is a soft, wispy introduction, but it’s a feint. The album really hits its lurch with the strychnine-laced haunt of “Telephone Ringing.” The track’s demented bounce, tiptoeing guitars, and evil, elfin vocals recur throughout The Midnight Room, suggesting not just isolation, but also insomnia and fever dreams. That instrumental bounce is nowhere more apparent than on “Take My Hand,” whose romantic plea, “Take my hand early in the morning,” sounds like it comes not after a night of love so much as a night of fraying hallucinations. Elsewhere, that sickly carnival swagger gives way to moments of serenity, as on “The Ferryman” and the stargazing coda “Come Closer.” But for the most part, The Midnight Room is an unsettling place. ERIC GRANDY

But what happened to that second star? From Wikipedia:

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An evolved, average-size star will now shed its outer layers as a planetary nebula. If what remains after the outer atmosphere has been shed is less than 1.4 solar masses, it shrinks to a relatively tiny object (about the size of Earth) that is not massive enough for further compression to take place, known as a white dwarf.[37] The electron-degenerate matter inside a white dwarf is no longer a plasma, even though stars are generally referred to as being spheres of plasma. White dwarfs will eventually fade into black dwarfs over a very long stretch of time.

In larger stars, fusion continues until the iron core has grown so large (more than 1.4 solar masses) that it can no longer support its own mass. This core will suddenly collapse as its electrons are driven into its protons, forming neutrons and neutrinos in a burst of inverse beta decay, or electron capture. The shockwave formed by this sudden collapse causes the rest of the star to explode in a supernova.

Most of the matter in the star is blown away by the supernovae explosion (forming nebulae such as the Crab Nebula[38]) and what remains will be a neutron star (which sometimes manifests itself as a pulsar or X-ray burster) or, in the case of the largest stars (large enough to leave a stellar remnant greater than roughly 4 solar masses), a black hole.[39] In a neutron star the matter is in a state known as neutron-degenerate matter, with a more exotic form of degenerate matter, QCD matter, possibly present in the core. Within a black hole the matter is in a state that is not currently understood.