Tuesday 22 June 2010



QBiM SPiNS: Stars The Five Ghosts

At the end of 2009 I made a list of the 10 records that defined the last 10 years for me, and one of them was Heart, the second full length album by Stars, released in 2003.  That album was the spark that brought me back to Canadian indie music and the album that eventually led me down the road to starting this here blog.  For better or worse, Stars are inextricably linked with QBiM, and therefore any movement of the band’s members are always going to be up for close scrutiny on these pages.

What I loved most about Heart and it’s follow-up Set Yourself on Fire was the effortless effervescence of Stars’ peerless pop songs like “Elevator Love Letter”, “Ageless Beauty” and “Your Ex-Lover is Dead”.  There was also a strong through-line to those albums, a consistency in style; the songs didn’t all sound alike, but the all sounded like Stars.  Their Myspace page tag lines used to define Stars as “melodramatic pop” and by the time In Our Bedroom After the War rolled out, they seemed to be favouring the melodrama more than the pop (see “Barricade” and “Personal” as examples).  Still, it was undeniably a Stars record.  Their new album, The Five Ghosts progresses similarly.  The band has continued to move away from the indie rock-meets-electro-pop sound of Set Yourself On Fire and are embracing darker territory.  Album opener “Dead Hearts” makes a grand statement with it’s sweeping synth washes; it’s a classic Amy Millan/Torquil Campbell duet.  It’s a solid song, one of their best, but what follows sometimes fails to live up to their former glories.  “Fixed” and “We Don’t Want Your Body” court that majestic Stars quality of yore, but overall, what’s lacking is any songwriting of significance.  The second half of the record doesn’t have anything with real power to motivate a casual listener to make it all the way to the end.  Devotees like myself will enjoy the quiet beauty of “the Last Song Ever Written” and the Amy Millan-led “How Much More”, but I could imagine someone who’s not a Stars fan asking “How much more?” with a slightly sarcastic grimace.

Maybe I need more time with the record.  Maybe I need to lower my expectations.  Maybe I should give the guys a break.  Or maybe, The Five Ghosts is just destined to be my least favourite Stars record (there has to be one, right?).  That doesn’t mean it’s a bad record–far from it.  Perhaps, like any affair, time begins to wear away the romantic notion that love last forever.  Maybe this is the record where my fandom falters, and I begin saying, “Yeah Stars?  I used to like them.”

I certainly hope not.  The more I hear “Dead Hearts” the more it becomes a new favourite Stars song, and the more I want the rest of The Five Ghosts to win me over.  “For better or worse,” I said at the start of this post, “Stars are inextricably linked with QBiM.“  I haven’t come all this way to just give up on them now.  Maybe we can work this out.

To be continued…

MP3: Stars “Dead Hearts”
Myspace: Stars
Facebook: Stars
Twitter: Stars





by J. Di Gioia | Comments Off

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under MP3, QBiM SPiNS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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