Stars w/the Dears, Aqueduct
Tues March 2, Crocodile, 9 pm, $10.
Is it excusable to still be entrenched in the music of the ’80s if you cultivate a collective fondness for new bands that, had their albums come out between, say, 1985 and 1987 rather than 2001 and 2003, would have sent you running to the record store just as urgently as did the Style Council’s Internationalists or the Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead? I may be biased, but I say yes, it is.
Perhaps it’s to justify having recently purchased the $100 box set The Complete Adventures of the Style Council, or having read three Smiths books in the past 12 months, that I keep the two albums released by the Montreal-based band Stars in the zippered case of at-the-ready CDs I carry around daily. No, it’s not justification–I love Stars. Stars’ attention-piquing 2001 debut, Nightsongs, sounds at times like the above-mentioned bands along with bits of New Order and the Chimes. But comparisons to newer bands such as Belle and Sebastian and the New Pornographers could also be made of Nightsongs, which features a soul-influenced chamber-pop core with easily detectable electronic nuances.
Heart, released in 2003, saw the band lightening up the mood a bit and, in doing so, producing the most unavoidably spirit-lifting album since Tahiti 80’s Wallpaper for the Soul and the New Pornographers’ debut, Mass Romantic. “The great thing about pop music is that it can contain idiocy and heavy-dutiness at the same time,” says Stars’ charmingly funny frontman, Torquil Campbell, who is also an actor with credits including Law & Order and Sex and the City. The band’s lofty pedigree is attributed to cofounder Chris Seligman as well, who has Broadway musicals in his resumé among the many orchestras he’s played with. Oh, and there’s Amy Milan, who’s done soundtrack work.
No wonder, then, both Nightsounds and Heart convey such a lovely theatrical quality, though the two are divergent in tone. Neither are lacking in pop hooks, however–if you love anything by Teenage Fanclub, or the Shins’ Chutes Too Narrow, you’ll find Heart to be equally, effortlessly accessible. Campbell cites, simply, “drugs and alcohol” as the great unifier of all pop music, and what keeps things from getting too erudite. But he believes you also have to be good. “It’s like in Spinal Tap, you know? It’s a fine line between clever and stupid. You can be clever, and then you can be indulgent of your cleverness, and you can lose sight of the essence of what I think pop music is, which is simplicity and trying to be as direct as you can be with that idea. If you throw vagaries at the wall, you seem to lose the genuineness.”
Despite the fact that it verges upon twee, only an absolute brute could sustain a curled lip for more than the time it takes Heart‘s opening track, “What the Snowman Learned About Love,” to play out. Honestly, I was in the worst mood when I first popped the album into my CD player, but five minutes later, as the boy-longs-for-the-rich-girl-themed “Elevator Love Letter” grabbed hold of my endocrine system and got the dopamine flowing, I was a beaming fool, veins fully pumping with tenderness. Heart is the sound of relief. Did the members of Stars know this as they were making the record? “We didn’t, because we seem to have some pretty hard hearts ourselves,” Campbell says with a laugh. “We were thinking about defrosting our own. We made it in a bedroom with one microphone, so it wasn’t like we expected anyone to care particularly what we were doing.” He does admit that their intent was to make music that people could feel was part of their lives. “I think we were very happy that we were able to complete it and that there’s a sense of peace in that we were doing it really for ourselves despite everything. I think there’s that sense of hope in it, and that seems to be what people are connecting with.”
And there’s the fact that a heart of stone is often formed around a crystal of romantic vulnerability. “Life is rarely so romantic as we want it to be,” says Campbell, who calls himself not a romantic so much as a romantic observer. “People have such mundane and depressing reactions to situations, and you wish they didn’t. I’m more interested in when those people who are caught up in love realize they’ve gone off course and things are fucked–that’s what interests us as a band.”