Stars
The Five Ghosts
(Vagrant/Shock)
The word 'drab' comes to mind. As do the words 'The Cranberries'. I don't want to give too much away here, but this - the fifth album from Canadian synth-heads Stars - sounds defeated, given-up.
It doesn't take a psychiatrist to work out that the lyrics on the opening song, 'Dead Hearts' might well be unintentionally aimed at the musicians themselves. "It's hard to know that you still care," Torquil Campbell laments in what he hopes to be a meaningful fashion, "I can say it but you won't believe me / Dead hearts are everywhere". Synthetic strings billow in an artificial wind-tunnel and imitation drums crash in. "They were kids that I once knew / They were kids I once knew," Amy Milan retorts, seemingly oblivious to the fact her band is now set on auto-pilot, and she is referencing her own past. The irony would be quite poignant, if the music wasn't so overwhelmingly dull. This is still the stand-out track on The Five Ghosts, incidentally. The remainder of this album is so artificial and grey it makes Dolores O'Riordan sound like a warm, compassionate human being.
Take 'I Died So I Could Haunt You' as a good example of the malady affecting Stars. The vocals are out-of-kilter with the vaguely upbeat synthetic drums: the lyrics are self-pitying but without any apparent reason or rancour. "Thousands of ghosts in the darkness / Lost in a strange neighbourhood / The lights from the warm houses haunt them / They forgot what they lost / But they know it was good," a muted Milan sings, again making a Freudian reference to her own past? The production is messy, cluttered: washes of synth competing with banks of synth and crystalline chimes of synth and a great thudding bass and unnecessary drum fills, vocals layering vocals but without even a pretence of harmony. Imagery hackneyed and the worst form of Gothic. And dull. Sure, there are dynamics, if you want to call the clunking breaks in-between verses that. The music stops for a moment to emphasise the vocals, then starts up again.
The Cure were bloody awful by the time the late 80s rolled along.
If you're looking for someone to match melancholy to the dance-floor, you'd be far better off turning to the current crop of femme Swedish pop stars (Lykke Li, El Perro Del Mar). On 'We Don't Want Your Body', Stars attempt to be OMD - but OMD always had a tune to call their own. The formula works far better when they cut the clutter: on the gently paced 'Changes' , Milan's sweet-enough voice is given enough space and sympathetic backing to allow it to shine. She (and the band) keep the melody restrained, never opting for the bombast and pseudo-melancholy pathos that brings the rest of this album down. Think of this one as The Cranberries back when they were good (hard, I know) but without the voice.
It's a mystery why this band have been shoved into the limelight, really. Nothing they do hasn't been done a thousand times before, and with more intrigue, personality and melody: and yet it is Stars that shift the units. 'The Passenger' is the sort of song Howard Jones would have rejected for being too cheesy. 'The Last Song Ever Written', thank God, isn't.
It's another grey day in the paradise that some would call Canada. And no one really cares.
Everett True