The Stars At Night Are Big And Loud And Bright
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Stars (Kaitlin Parker)
But the moment the lights dimmed and the crowded stopped their murmuring, this night went to the Stars.
And while the group needs no introduction in Los Angeles, they were nice enough to give one anyway.
“You’re always so fucking good to us,” front man Torquil Campbell declared to the full but not quite sold-out crowd. “We’re Stars from Montreal, and you’re awesome from Los Angeles.”
In addition to Campbell, Stars are Amy Millan, Chris Seligman, Evan Cranley and Patrick McGee.
The band is in middle of a long tour promoting their June 2010 release, "The Five Ghosts." Imagery from the album’s cover art, a black and white photo of a young girl holding flowers, made its way on stage. Throughout the night, group members threw white roses into the audience, petals fluttering as they descended over the crowd.
In their albums and even more so in this live performance, Stars are unapologetically dramatic.
With Millan in a sparkly black dress and dark jacket and the men of the group wearing suits, the group exhibited energy bordering on over-exertion through a "Five Ghosts"-heavy set, back-lit by blasts of color-changing lights.
And Stars are not the type to shed layers and unbutton jackets after the second song. There was a certain formality about this affair. Only in between songs when the colors would cease, the lights would dim, and silhouettes on stage would momentarily shrink did the revelation occur. Aha! They’re human after all.
Bringing in a fan favorite early, Millan shone with “Elevator Love Letter” from 2003 album "Heart," before the group moved handedly through newer songs like “The Passenger” and “Wasted Daylight.”
Campbell and Millan dedicated the latter to LA, and with lyrics like “Three in the afternoon, we still haven’t moved,” the ode seemed fitting enough.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of Stars is the balance between the voices of Campbell and Millan. On stage, that give and take becomes even more palpable, as Millan punched the air and swung her arms in big circles as Campell sang, and then Campbell turned around, momentarily lost in a hip-shaking private dance party as Millan took the mic.
Invariably, they’d reconvene to bring songs to their inevitable conclusions. Campbell reached way back in the band’s repertoire for a powerhouse performance on a variation of “The Comeback” from the 2001 EP of the same title.
True to form, Millan took the next song, sitting on a bench to sing an instrumentally stripped-down version of “Ageless Beauty” from "Set Yourself on Fire," the group’s perhaps most critically acclaimed album from 2004.
While the trademark of the song on the album is the almost orchestral arrangement of instrumentation, the less-produced version presented on stage was striking in an entirely different way, giving more credence to Millan’s deceptive voice that can go form timid to soaring with little warning.
Despite the bubbles machines occasionally pumping out soap’s most fun form during more up-tempo tunes, the entire performance felt draped in a certain heaviness that the group just couldn’t seem to shake.
The closest they came was during the dance-inducing “We Don’t Want Your Body,” that despite the title is bound the make listeners feel the opposite. But then Campbell clarified. “I want the body of the person I know down the road, not some fucker on a billboard.”
Looking around the crowd, it was clear that lots of people came with a person they knew from down the road. The couples had attachment to these songs, as Stars seemingly served as the soundtrack for some relationship-defining moment.
As the time came for “Your Ex-Lover is Dead,” another well-known narrative song from "Set Yourself on Fire," the crowd seemed to audibly exhale. They had been waiting for this. And for good reason.
The back and forth between Campbell and Millan, the slow build, the keyboard-laden explosion, and the way the drums crash just as the two ex-lovers in the song decide, “There’s nothing to say,” combined to create the perfect sonic embodiment of bittersweet.
Before the encore, the group played an excerpt of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Presidential Farewell Address from 1961 to the darkened venue. Also known as the “Military-Industrial Complex Speech,” Eisenhower’s words hung like a dark specter, a warning that the country has already failed to heed.
“Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.”
It was against this decidedly political backdrop that Stars played their final songs for the night, perhaps with no coincidence that “I Died So I Could Haunt You” among them.
Still slightly encumbered in their songs, they were sincere in their thanks. “We know how much great shit there is to do in this city,” Campbell said. He promised that next time they come to town, they’ll do two shows.
Whether they’ll still have that kind of Stars-power when the time comes remains to be seen.
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