Why is this the last time? Who was standing at the station and what was in that letter? The ethereal fifth studio album from Montreal’s finest indie pop outfit Stars catch shadows of memories in a fleeting breath of the past. It’s not obvious to write an endearing synth pop album about the afterlife, (the best description I heard was “breezy bereavement”) but “Five Ghosts” is like a glittering nighttime sky that lulls you into a nostalgic bubble about the past and things that may have happened, or did you only dream that they were there? The inspiration came from the band’s keyboardist Chris Seligman, who during the making of the album was staying in a haunted bed and breakfast in Vancouver and kept dreaming of a ghost trying to enter his body and kill him. He relocated to a hotel. The album reminds me of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love” which also tells haunting tales of the big sky and such. Kate’s songs are more menacing though, these glide quite prettily on the surface of foreboding. The album opens with vocalist Torquil Campbell asking Amy Millan to “Tell me everything that happened, tell me everything you saw…” before concluding that “dead hearts are everywhere”. The girl/boy chemistry of Campbell’s and Millan’s conversational vocals are effortless. And the story takes off from there. Millan hides from the world in “Wasted Daylight”, in the most radio friendly track “Fixed” she asks “Is it your fall?” and the eerily nostalgic “The Last Song Ever Written” ponders something very definite ending, perhaps a childhood that invariably will fade out of reach, or even a summer that will never return as lingering and sweltering again. Thinking about it, I don’t seem to know that many Canadian bands. That’s a shame if this is what I’ve been missing.
DEAD HEARTS
WASTED DAYLIGHT
FIXED
LAST SONG EVER WRITTEN
