Stars in their Eyes
Canadian indie band searches for flowers amid the rubble on war-haunted new album
Oh my god, the war is over! Why didn’t anybody tell me? Oh, wait—it’s not. In fact, war permeates the new album by Canadian indie-poppers Stars, but it’s more atmosphere than subject matter. The title’s “after” doesn’t mean Stars are imagining the literal end of war. It means they’ve retreated to a mental space where it can’t reach them. This is a precarious mental balancing act, and these songs have the character of isolation chambers with explosions wracking their perimeters. “Forget your name / Forget your fear,” Amy Millan encourages us on “The Night Starts Here.” On “Midnight Coward,” as bombs fall on Iraq, Palestine, Israel and elsewhere, Stars are “drunk and walking with the sun.” And on the title track, war is recast as a direct metaphor for interpersonal relationships—a move that might seem either ballsy or incredibly self-absorbed at a time when real war, with its visceral human toll, weighs so heavily upon the world.
As such, In Our Bedroom After the War is the musical equivalent of a big-budget Bay/Bruckheimer film like Pearl Harbor, where an event of huge historical magnitude is reduced to a painted backdrop for an archetypal love story. The album is simultaneously infuriating—because it’s so cloistered from the harsh realities that frame it—and veritable, because this is exactly the way many of us privileged Westerners live. Directly unaffected by war but plagued by guilt about it, it hovers over us like a black cloud. We breathe it like air, unseen but omnipresent.
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