Reflecting on his Montreal band Stars’ eighth album, co-frontperson Torquil Campbell said, “We make the small things big and the big things a chorus.” Stars stretch hushed electro-pop into scrambling arena rock, blending the Smiths’ guitar romance with bedroom soul like the product of some Mancunian Motown. Campbell, along with Amy Millan and their four bandmates, have been fiddling with their blend of heartache and hedonism, dance beats and guitar sparks, for almost 20 years now. So it’s little surprise that Campbell knows what they’re best at, even though Stars have had a run that sometimes made us wonder. If 2012’s The North was a cautious return to form and 2014’s No One Is Lost had some fun with it, then There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light finds the band with their feet on the streets and their heads scraping the sky, just where they belong.
Indispensable to Stars’ appeal is the platonic chemistry of Campbell and Millan, two different but complementary singers (he the overstated striver, she the understated virtuoso) who were like the xx before the xx, in blazing pastels instead of chiaroscuro. The greatness of their third album, 2004’s Set Yourself on Fire, is so unimpeachable that people forget about 2003’s Heart. (The throbbing “Elevator Love Letter” is still the most perfect Stars song.) “Sometimes the TV is like a lover,” Campbell sings on that album’s title track, which, like all his best lyrics, is embarrassing because it’s true. Of course, in Stars’ music, lovers are also like TV: streamlined, composited, and dramatized with a cinematic splendor that would make Baz Luhrmann blush. There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light may be the most Starry album title possible, with its unsubtle implication that love is the only real thing in a sea of encroaching artificiality, an idea made sonic in music where the rawest sentimentality is clad in the archest theater.
Airy and danceable, There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light revives our faith in Stars. We get locket-size images of yellow taxis waiting in the night, clocks chiming in empty rooms; lots of eyes and skies, boys and cars and streets. Words like “dream” and “love” are repeated until they lose all sense, or rather, infuse everything around them. The opening track “Privilege” is slinky and inviting, as Millan does slow flips around a silvery herringbone guitar. “Fluorescent Light” comes on with the particular hushed intensity that Campbell sings with when he’s planning to tug our heartstrings, but it turns into the indie-pop equivalent of a lavish club anthem.
Though Stars have reverted to a more plainly romantic, ingenuous style, you might notice, on “Fluorescent Light” and elsewhere, a more adult cast to their dynamics of desire, with more regret and ambiguity crosshatched behind the crayon strokes. “Losing to You,” where Millan and Campbell’s vocal lines cling together like lovers walking in the dark, is clearly set in an adult relationship of considerable duration, and it intuitively captures the premonitory feeling of losing someone you can’t imagine losing, but will. “Is it strong enough a bond to carry on or is there something else that’s really true?” This is a far cry from the Stars of earlier songs like “Ageless Beauty,” when they had all the answers.
The unwavering “yes” of Stars has deepened into a “maybe,” but the music still beams with conviction. Millan’s confident vocals on “Hope Avenue” make it sound like she could be a popstar in the vein of Robyn. Campbell gets a requisite U2-style burner on “Alone,” and it’s pretty glorious. The trim, popstep-inflected productions roll on through the piano-caressed “We Called It Love,” with big haymakers from Campbell (“The Maze”) and cosseting enchantments from Millan (“California, I Love that Name”) coming all the way through the end.
It’s surely significant that, for the first time, Stars turned over some control to an outsider: producer Peter Katis, who has worked often with the National. For a band like Stars, whose lifeblood and liability has always been bombast, having someone around to arch an eyebrow at them now and then must go a long way. There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light sounds like a band who defied the notion of growing up by realizing that it did anyway, and that it’s strong enough to carry on.
