Album Review : Stars - The Five Ghosts
- Written by Ben Dufton
“Dead hearts are everywhere…It’s hard to know they’re out there” - so states the opening track on Stars’ latest album, The Five Ghosts. These vaguely disconcerting lines help to set the tone of the new collection by the Canadian outfit – melancholic (as always), but also lost and a little hopeless. The recurring theme of ghosts throughout (the album title being the most obvious, but also in individual song titles such as ‘I Died So I Could Haunt You’ and, lyrically, examples such as “the kids that I once knew” from ‘Dead Hearts’), suggests a sense of loss to the feeling of being lost.
The Five Ghosts begins much as you would expect a Stars album to – hazy synths washing over the almost conversational boy/girl vocal interplay of Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan. Second track ‘Wasted Daylight’ brings in the beats, picking up the pace of proceedings to that of a gentle jog. This, however, is where it stays.
And herein lies my gripe with the album – it is very one paced and really quite formulaic. There is nothing as obviously gripping as ‘Take Me To The Riot’ or eerily haunting as ‘Personal’ from In Our Bedroom After The War. Granted, the baroque flourishes from single ‘We Don’t Want Your Body’ raise this ode to unrequited lust (“You sold me some cheap ecstasy / So you could have some sex with me / I don't want your body / I don't want your body”) a touch above, and the yearning torch song ‘Changes’ does offer a pleasant change of pace, complete with a wonderfully poignant, contradictory chorus (“Changes, I've never been good with change / I hate it when it all stays the same”). I think we have all felt Millan’s frustration as voiced here.
Millan’s vocals seem predominant across the album, Campbell taking a back seat on lead off single ‘Fixed’ amongst others. In fact, in some of these other places, Campbell’s voice merges a little too well with the shimmering electronic washes with the end result being that a lot of the album kind of just floats past.