Review/Love: In Our Bedroom After the War- Stars

“…will we wake in the morning and know what it was for, up in our bedrooms after the war?”



Imagine walking into your room, ready to fall into bed, ready to sleep, but for some reason you decide to crawl out of your open bedroom window and escape into the city. Maybe you’ve slept all day, maybe sleep just isn’t coming, or maybe you’ve mixed up an ungodly redbull/espresso/legal white pill concoction designed to wire you for the foreseeable future. Whatever the case, the night is stretching out in front of you with complete potential and dangerous hope. Whatever your dark adventure, Canadian orchestral pop-rockers Stars provides a capable soundtrack.

So let’s kick this long evening off right, because “In Our Bedroom After the War” is about every time you decided to answer the phone instead of silencing it, every time you walked out the door instead of into bed, and every single moment that you’ve spent on the moonlight side of life. While those intervals may leave you exhausted for the next week and wondering what exactly happened, those are moments that you don’t/can’t forget.

Everything starts with the beautiful epigram laced intro, “The Beginning after the End,” and from that moment on, it’s hard to imagine yourself not playing a role in each of the albums thirteen tracks.

It’s even harder when lead singers Amy Milan and Torquil Campbell lace a seductive danceable beat with their smooth voices, pleading, “the night starts here, forget your name, forget your fears.” From that point on, you’re sucked into this evening’s adventure and wherever Milan and Campbell might decide to go- you’re stuck for the ride.

While the night may have started on the second track, it’s not until the driving crescendo of “Take Me to the Riot” finally breaks, that you feel like you finally understand what the lure of the night actually means. It’s in the capacity packed clubs, dancing with strangers you’ve never seen and will never see again. It’s in the climax of the stage with the lead singer controlling the hearts and emotions of every person in the room- one set list, two encores, and a collective gasp for air at the end. Take Me to the Riot is arguably one of the most epic songs ever written by Stars, but the night doesn’t stop here.

Whoever the hero of this album might be can’t escape romance, as the slow ballad of “My Favorite Book” slows everything down a few notches. If “Take Me to the Riot” was the climax, My Favorite Book is the curbside afterwards. But this slowdown only lasts one song, as “Midnight Coward” highlights what Stars does perfectly, ethereally sweet pop songs built around the tag tandem combination of Campbell and Milan.

Unfortunately this album seemed to be cursed with the same fate afflicting movie theaters, Cinderella, and curfew chained teens- midnight is the last call for excitement. “The Ghost of Genova Heights” is the worst track on the entire album, as an attempt to create a ballad surrounding a pacifist minded general comes off schmaltzy, over-wrought, and just plain boring.
I wanted to turn the album off after that song, but then Stars had to write “Personal” into their early morning hours, and if you’re still awake, the story will leave you holding your breath and waiting for the whispered conclusion. Reminiscent of “Let it Go” from their stunning 2004 release, “Set Yourself on Fire,” Campbell and Milan prove they can tell stripped down modern day romantic tragedies like no one else.

The next four songs on the album make up the rest of the dark morning hours and the sleep deprived tracks paint an incredibly pessimistic view of the world. Whether it’s nearly cliché piano driven protestor and police action drama of “Barricade”, or the doomed love of Milan’s warbling “Window Bird”- the final hours of the night could be summed up in a line from Life 2: The Unhappy Ending, “Why can't the ending be happy?
Why must it always resolve this way?”

Dark stories are rubberstamped across the musical landscape of mainstream music. The shelves and play lists of angst ridden teenagers across America are filled with depressing hyper introspective music that seems to beg the listener to tie a millstone around their neck and leap from the nearest tower. That’s the easy path to take as an artist.

REM made sure we knew that everybody hurts, but for some reason Stars seems bound to make sure that everybody hopes. Whether it’s “Don’t be afraid to Sing” (Heart) or “Calendar Girl” (Set Yourself on Fire), Stars always finishes their adventures pointing at the light, rather than the darkness. Motivated more out of an existential choice rather than any true reliance on ultimate salvation, the pop-maestros finish their latest album in the same place, with the title track answering the sunrise with something nearly as glorious.

It starts slow, with Campbell and a quiet piano gently waking up the exhausted audience. By the time the song hits its gloriously blinding conclusion with trumpets, violins, guitars and a full chorus blasting forth; even the most tired of cynics couldn’t believe that the future was devoid of good.

While “In our Bedroom After the War,” isn’t perfect- few nights are. The album breaks little new artistic ground for the Canadians, recycling some themes and hooks, but it keeps on doing what Stars has been doing since their beginning-making beautiful pop songs. That’s something pretty special in our modern musical landscape as pop music has been profaned and cheapened to the point of near irrelevancy, but when Stars takes you on a musical journey through the night, you can’t help but smile.

This review may lack sufficient bite or criticism and come across like a grade school love piece, but take a listen to Stars and see if you can resist a playground infatuation- I couldn’t.

And you know what?

It seems like I’m not the only one with a little crush on the Canadian songsters, as they’re playing a sold-out 9:30 club this Saturday night. I’ll be right there with the rest of the crowd, because while the album is beautiful, what Stars creates onstage is even more incredible than the recorded product- they not only recreate the sounds you love, but communicate the stories with an incredible urgency/passion and beauty.

So, climb out the window with Stars sometime and enjoy a night full of romance, danger and more than a little bit of uniquely sweet pop music.