Stars
The Comeback EP
Le Grand Magistery
Stars is the kind of band that blue lights and fog machines were made for. Unique and enigmatic, the very personality of the band is so completely ambiguous that their songs develop a sense of foreign beauty ñ like a charming subtitled film, except the words are in English and the band is from Canada. Their music is like a silk teddy bear; it’s so simultaneously intimate and distant that it conjures up the kind of images poets get made fun of for, like comfy frictionless surfaces. Paradoxical semantics aside, there’s something just strikingly wonderful about a band that plays inviting pop songs with enough complexity and depth – both lyrically and musically – to keep a five-song EP sounding fresh long after its first listen. They are, in a Miles Davis kind of way, cool.
There are no crunching guitars or speedy licks in Stars; rather, they’re pop in a Belle & Sebastian sense – calm and collected, thriving off of subtlety instead of volume. Keyboard-heavy, electronic effect-happy and with a fine sense of vocal male-female harmony, this band knows how to be experimental without sounding exclusive. The Comeback EP is soothingly sentimental, but not sappy by any means. Instead, it’s music that’s surprisingly familiar, considering it’s like nothing you’ve heard before. They are Stars. They describe themselves.
