Stars: The North

As we crawl slowly out of this winter of 2013, I find myself thinking of this very good Stars album, which came out toward the beginning of it and seems to capture its character. On the title track, Torquil Campbell sings, "It's so cold in this country... every road home is long." That seems to sum up the album pretty well: although it's fairly lushly instrumented and accessibly hooky, the sound is very minor and subdued, with the wall of sound working to overtake the moody, theatrical vocals. The backdrop is pale but deep. The singers are hushed and aching, lonely and isolated and singing about it.

It's an interesting item after the band's previous album, The Five Ghosts, which I reviewed early enough on that I can't bear to look back on what I said. There were a number of powerful, mold-breaking moments on that album, and a number of wide shots that didn't land with me. The North has a higher floor and lower ceiling: they don't go out of their range as much, and as a result they wind up with an album that is a more consistent and overall enjoyable listen, but one with a less thrilling upside. I can listen to it the whole way through, and only a few tracks will stand out as being high points, and even fewer will stand out as being lesser ones.

It's made mostly out of chilling, frozen pop, which like much of Stars' music skirts an 80s-like line between dance and rock. "Backlines" transmutes from a guitar riff to a synthy chorus and builds string-laden denouement. The elements never clash because they are all with a single purpose. Their command over tone on this album is impressive. The liquid "Lights Changing Colour" and mystic duet "Loose Ends Will Make Knots" are among the finest, most Starsy in atmosphere. "Progress" improves on some of the stilted indie-beat of The Five Ghosts, revealing one of many moments where you really see the heart of the album. "Through The Mines" feels like a reminder that as good and popular as Of Monsters and Men is, Stars got there first and are capable of doing it as well as ever. Amy Millan's voice is a beautiful coo. As more and more top acts feature female vocalists, none has quite the bittersweet earnestness of hers.

Nestled between these moody atmospherics are some nimble indie pop tunes that are bright and upbeat but don't quite break the tone of the album, helped by Campbell's stately delivery. "Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When Give It" benefits from this restraint, with the music swelling beneath him and gradually overtaking him. "A Song Is A Weapon" is my favourite individual moment on the album, balancing the precious tone with a catchy beat and good lyrics.

The album cinches up its mastery of tone, its command of "swoony indie rock balladry" with the closing tracks, the staggering "The 400" with its choked up refrain of "It has to go right this time", and the tactful dubstep-lite of "Walls" with its call-and-answer vocals. Ultimately, the album leaves more suggested than outright stated, which is where it has the edge over its predecessor.

Stars are a good band, but sometimes hit and miss with their album packages. Here it all seems to come together. The songs stand out from each other but also stand together into a 43-minute piece that plays very well in a single sitting. I think none of the songs on it will be as well-regarded, years down the line, as "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" or "Reunion" or, for me personally, "Wasted Daylight." But this is the set they've probably been hoping they would put together for many years. Each song isn't a knockout, but as it goes on all the pieces go into place and the individual moments assert themselves for what they are. Pick it up if you were thinking about it, and you'll be glad you did.

Buy this album now: iTunes (Canada) //iTunes (USA) // Amazon.ca // Amazon.com

Serious Contenders: Stars, "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead"

Stars, that most theatrical of Canadian indie pop-rock bands, creates a scene and a mood and characters in sound. This is one of the most beautiful, lovely, longing songs I know and it's always a pleasure to stop what I'm doing and let myself get absorbed in it. There are many songs that preach love and devotion, some sincerely, some truthfully. But for me it'll always be songs about the difficulty of ever having been in love.

Happy Valentines Day.

Stars: The Five Ghosts

What do you think is going to happen when you have a mopey, melancholy lot of Canadian indie-popsters like Stars, and direct them toward a concept album linking romance, loss, and loneliness with death and the afterlife? Hm? Eh? It's called he Five Ghosts and it is about ghosts. Ghosts for your retro-80's dance pop.

It's a lonely, haunted, quiet, cold album, made all the more lonesome because there's actually a lot going on amidst the mourning. Ever walked down a busy city street on a cold dreary fall day? Everyone just drifts onward with no regard for others in the world, but there are so many of you. This music is like that. Synths and beats sparkly as quiet, lamenting vocals waft over them. "Thousands of ghosts in the daylight," sings co-lead vocalist Torquil Campbell on "I Died So I Could Haunt You," "One day we all disappear / We walk till we get to the harbor / They'll never know we were there." The contrast between the lively instrumentation and the dead vocalization is pretty substantial.

It's hard to get ahold of, what the music is supposed to be like. The band tries, sometimes too hard and sometimes unsuccessfully, to reach a kind of profound moment that underlies their music. Here and there it strengthens it, and elsewhere it makes it sound a bit silly. I don't like the opening track, "Dead Hearts," much for its verses, a silly little call and response thing played utterly straight. Though the chorus contains one of the better lyrics on the album, "It's hard to know they're out there / It's hard to know that you still care," which is the first indication of the depth of the ghost metaphor, about the intangible nature of love and human feeling. But they push the seriousness and strain it a fair bit on the album. I'm troubled by "We Don't Want Your Body," whose verses are too deliberate to be funky and loose, and whose chorus uses the line "You sold your soul to ecstasy / So you could have some sex with me," which just such a silly goddamn thing to say. "Some sex." It's otherwise a good song, but that stiffness does them in whenever the album starts to catch fire, and takes me out of the experience.

Amy Millan carries most of her parts beautifully. Her voice has a modest yet sultry quality to it, that could go from being utterly bemused by the world to being supremely seductive. It runs that spectrum in her first solo go, "Wasted Daylight," and while "Fixed" isn't much of a vocal showcase, it's a great piece of songcraft that bounces along so energetically it seems to have been important from another album and band. That "You / You hold my heart" hook is a winner, though, and "How Much More" toward the end of the album lifts the spirit up higher than I would've expected. And "Changes" gives us a modern Peggy Lee or Patsy Cline, both in tune and attitude. Off-kilter though it may be, I can see "The Passenger" having a life outside this album: it's where their cinematic (character and storytelling) tendencies mesh best with the music itself.

But yeah, the album takes chances that often don't pan out or are just hard to listen to. "The Last Song Ever Written" and "He Dreams He's Awake" gradually build toward their point, but there's something so fundamentally-unbalanced about their construction that leaves a bad taste with me. The former is more clever than I initially gave it credit for, and the latter has its place in setting the mood and building the aura of the album. But generally speaking Torquil's voice is my least favourite aspect of Stars' sound, as it represents that strain for meaning.

This isn't a lovable album. It won't wrap its arms around you, it doesn't aim to please, that much is clear. It's serious, sad-ass music, and you have to be in a particular mood to even appreciate it, which is not an ideal condition for good music. I know Stars mainly by two previous singles, "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead," and "Reunion." Those two songs are not exactly "I'm a Believer," when it comes to pop sunshine. They're dreary, storytelling break-up songs. And here's an album that breaks up with life, with the world around you. At its warmest, it's ice cold, and at its most joyful it's still numb.

They definitely wrote and recorded the album the album they meant to, although they didn't probably hit all the points they aimed for. The real question is whether that works for you. Because it's not going to be easy to get into, and if you do, it may not even be that rewarding. I think it's underrated because of that, and because of its tendency (due to its construction and goals) to strain for meaning and reach into pretension. But on every listen, I found more and more to recommend it until I found more tracks I liked than did not.

Whether it succeeds or not, it's music that tries for something, and in fact winds up with something, something I haven't heard before. Feelings stir up in this album that you may not be willing to face. But you might be surprised by what you find when you listen to this one.

Buy this album from iTunes now!