Stars In Our Bedroom After The War by: Steve Scully Mon:17-Sep-07 Label: Arts & Crafts/Shiny Year: 2007 WB rating 90 out of 100

The haunting opening to Stars’ last album, Set Yourself On Fire, was so unforgettably well-judged that it could almost be said the album suffered for it. It began with lead singer Torquil Campbell’s father, doing his best Vincent Price impression, proclaiming “When there’s nothing left to burn/you have to set yourself on fire,” before ‘Your Ex-Lover is Dead’, the graceful and breathtaking opener began to weave its magic. The remainder of the album was captivating, at times touching on the same beautiful melancholy of ‘Ex-Lover’, but the summit had already been reached.

In Our Bedroom After The War, emulating somewhat the beginning of Stars’ previous album, begins with an instrumental track. ‘The Beginning After the End’, contains a spoken-word poem echoing the album title: “Oh, the blood and the treasure/And then losing it all/The time that we wasted/And the place where we fall/Will we wake in the morning and know what it was for/Up in our bedroom after the war?” The instrumental is a gathering storm of electronic melodies and beats, leading into this melodramatic poem with as much grandeur as possible, sounding almost as much like a triumphal march as it does a funeral procession. But with ‘The Beginning After the End’ have Stars, again, peaked too early?

You could say that In Our Bedroom is all about the calm after the storm, but perhaps it’s more suited to being placed in the metaphorical storm’s eye. There’s definite relief and hope permeating the record, but the melodrama that is so intrinsic to Stars’ art makes unconditional positivity something only foolishly held, and only momentarily so.

As with Set Yourself On Fire, this album’s emotional core is one of contradiction and incomprehensible mixed emotions – hope coming out of loss, love out of anger, fear out of peace. The simple sorrow and grief that some people interpret in Stars’ music is a misjudgment. ‘The Night Starts Here’ sees Stars’ two lead vocalists, Campbell and Amy Millan, providing dualistic, polarised emotional viewpoints: Campbell singing of “the big black cloud over you and me,” Millan urging the most pessimistic of us to “forget your fear.” The unmistakable pop melody sits as much in contrast with the song’s tentative, anxious content as the thematic elements themselves, the metaphor of ‘night’ elusive and ambiguous, signifying both calmness and impending doom. The repetitiveness of this track is its strength. The lyrics repeat, the synth swells underneath and the words gain weight, moving from quiet introspection to didactic chant.

‘Personal’ is another moment of glorious, evocative songwriting that harks back to Stars’ best. The piano and subtle synth underlie the two vocalists singing in tandem, continuing the call-and-response structure in the form of a personals ad. The lyrics are touching without delving too far into cheesy cliché: “Why did you not show up?/I waited for an hour/I finally gave up/I thought once that i saw you/I thought that you saw me/I guess we’ll never meet now/It wasn’t meant to be.”

This song helps to narrow In Our Bedroom’s scope. There’s no doubt that the album title conjours up images of war-stricken Iraq, but Stars take the necessary steps to bring their ‘war’ into a personal domain. The ‘war’ in this case is one focused around self-perception, the personals ad is, in our cynical society, the picture of self-loathing and anxiety: “28 and bored/Grieving over loss,” Millan sings, Campbell responding with, “thanks so much for response/These things can be scary.” Again we’re confronted with hope, disappointment and desire, three hallmarks of Stars’ works; ‘Personal’ conveys them in a form that would otherwise cringingly gimmicky, but escape such shallowness with subtlety and self-conscious understatedness, a quality carried through to the next track, ‘Barricade’.

In ‘Barricade’, sounding almost like Damien Rice, with a sole piano accompanying him, Campbell belts out some gorgeous little poetic lines of love – “I looked at you and knew/You were the only thing that mattered/There was no one for me but you” – and the inextricability of love from hate:  “Oh how could anyone not want/To rip it all apart/Oh how could anyone not love/Your cold black heart.”

Stars’ trademark is undoubtedly the presence of their vocalists. Campbell and Millan aren’t quite as talented as many, but the honesty of their voices make for smooth, emotive and above all strongly melodic bases in every song. ‘My Favourite Book’ sees Millan’s quiet, textured vocals at their best; the harmonies the two vocalists reach for in the ‘Midnight Coward’ provide cohesiveness. Many of In Our Bedroom’s songs expose Stars’ definite talent for soaring pop-rock choruses, and illustrate perfectly the band’s willingness to step away from grand, heart-wrenching anthems in favour of simple, hook-inspired tunes. ‘Take Me To The Riot’, the first of such moments, has more in common with New Wave revival acts like Editors than Stars’ Broken Social Scene roots, and Campbell’s R ‘n’ B falsetto in the chorus of ‘The Ghost Of Genova Heights’ is a bold departure from the usual paradigm.

The album’s penultimate track, ‘Today Will Be Better, I Swear!’, a song primarily advocating hope, descends into a quiet swirl of synth, and leads perfectly into the final statement on the record, ‘In Our Bedroom After The War’. This moment of unbridled optimism is the album’s most poignant moment. Characterised until now by a tainted view of the future, a hestitant approach to life and change, In Our Bedroom is completed perfectly by this unbelievably postive outlook: “Lift your head and look out the window/Stay that way for the rest of the day and watch the time go/Listen the birds sing/Listen the bells ring/All the living are dead and the dead are all living/The war is over and we are beginning.” Building to a string-laden, choral crescendo, the song exhibits epic songwriting at its best, and a determination on the artist’s part to bring the album to a resonating close.

In Our Bedroom After The War does not suffer for its predecessor. While echoing in parts the same emotive drive, perhaps even structural qualities of Set Yourself On Fire, this record is an accomplished and powerful personal statement. Covering all the emotional bases, In Our Bedroom appeals to the anxiety-ridden, helping to alleviate stresses while possessing enough pop-rock savvy to avoid heavy-handedness. At times subtle, at others brilliantly grandiose, this album represents Stars’ continued rise, and further cements their spot alongside the likes of Arcade Fire as one of Canada’s supreme musical offerings.