Stars – Page 5 – My (life in) music lists

Best tunes of 2010: #7 Stars “Dead hearts”

In my post on “Fixed” (Stars other appearance on this particular list at #20), I wrote about my mad search to find a physical CD copy of the band’s fifth album, “The five ghosts”, on the day of its release. If you’ve already read that piece and forgot what I wrote, I’ll save you the trip back and let you know that I finally found a copy. “Dead hearts” was the first song I heard when I put the disc in my car’s player for the trip back home afterwards. I fell in love with it immediately, which set the tone for the rest of the album for me. It is also why it is ranked so high on this list, despite never being released as a single.

Quite a lovely track, albeit a haunting one. The gentle jingling guitars, the lonely tinkling piano, the string explosion, and Torquil Campbell’s and Amy Milan’s boy/girl, push/pull harmonies all call to mind a fantastical world of a creative child’s imagination. I’m thinking Never-Never land territory here, a dimension where logic and reality hold no truck. The idea of ‘dead hearts’ for me is an extension of the lyric in Arcade Fire’s “Wake up” that talks about children’s hearts getting torn up as they get older and bigger, which in turn seems to be a reference to Ally Sheedy’s line in “The Breakfast Club”: “When you grow up, your heart dies.”

So through all the mists and softness of the song, I see a group of children huddled around an impossibly massive bonfire while fireflies flit about in the sky around them. The curiosity of the younger ones full to bursting, breathlessly asking questions of their leader, the elder child that has been out and has experienced the bad old world. “Tell me everything that happened.” “Tell me everything you saw.” His news isn’t good. But maybe it’s a warning with a side of hope. .

Yeah. The lines “Dead hearts are everywhere” and “They were kids that I once knew” sound to me like Stars are hedging towards hope. And that sounds beautiful to me.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2010 list, click here.

Best tunes of 2010: #20 Stars “Fixed”

<< #21 | #19 >>

We’ve now reached the number twenty spot on this list of my favourite tunes of 2010 and it’s “Fixed”, the first single released off Stars’ fifth album, “The five ghosts”.

This particular album is one of the last albums that I was so hotly anticipating that I immediately rushed out to buy it on compact disc (another being one which will remain nameless because it might have a song or two later in this list). And I distinctly remember taking the car out after work, the day it was released, hitting a few stores and not finding it. I definitely remember thinking that the lack of real music stores still standing was quite sad and their selections and stock levels sadder still, the available shelf space having been replaced by DVDs, graphic novels, games, and other pop culture bric-a-brac. I was starting to get really desperate when I finally found a single copy at the second Best Buy that I tried. Crisis averted, I unwrapped it on the way out to the car and threw the disc in the player for the drive back home. I was zero percent disappointed, even despite the senseless, drawn-out search.

Stars are a five-piece indie pop band based out of Montreal that formed in New York in 2000 but whose members all grew up in Toronto. They make beautiful and grandiose pop music that you can often dance to and that usually has a social conscience. My favourite of their long players is 2004’s “Set yourself on fire” with “The five ghosts” likely taking second place but all of their albums boast some incredible tracks that dig themselves deep under your skin and become part of your being.

Their vocals are a responsibility shared between Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan, often trading verses on the same song, but this one is all Millan, her light touch juxtaposed against the rousing instrumentation. Campbell only comes in periodically as backing support, their voices layering beauty as per usual. Yet with Millan sporting similar vocal styles here as her close friend and ex-roommate, Emily Haines, “Fixed” almost feels like Metric tune. The drumming is peppy and the synths keep pace, urging any and all listeners to get up and dance, no matter where they are, the bus, a crowded sidewalk, or with a broom in the kitchen, and forget everything but the beat. It’s bliss, it’s love, it’s fun.