Stars are young and good looking and want to go out dancing. They're vibrant and dissolute and put French people saying, "Light, calm and voluptuous," at the beginnings of their records. They draw on dance music of the most Europop variety imaginable. Their lives are full of endless, evanescent pleasures; each night a new revolution of the senses. They laugh at people like us, dressed like old men and hard to drag out of the house. That's what they'd have you believe, anyway.
Nightsongs is, however, a devastatingly intelligent, moving record that wants desperately for you to think it's vapid. Stars make lush, keyboard-based pop songs that evoke a chronic-depressive Pet Shop Boys, or Stephin Merritt if he'd never heard of Bertold Brecht. These songs are short on the sort of cheese that typically plagues records of this genre-- horn parts, whispered vocals, wordless female backing vocals-- that they're sort of impossibly hip, chilly and suave. Very much the type of thing that one would imagine they play in bars that serve martinis in oversized glasses.
So why would those of us who may be young, but are otherwise ugly and hate dancing-- people who prefer old man bars where no one ever employs a DJ, and you never have to dance (unless you find the jingling of Keno machines incredibly rhythmic)-- care about Stars? These are the people we hate, right? People who've found a way to morally justify paying more than a $100 for pants? They're letting those people make records now?
They are. And goddamn it, those records are good. Nightsongs is an outstanding debut record, both in the trebly groove of its beats and the anomic fear and loathing of its lyrics. Stars take the dark edge of great dance records past-- the best of Chic, say, or Funkadelic, for God's sake-- and rub your face in it. This is a group, after all, known well for their dance cover of the Smiths' "This Charming Man," another band unusually interested in discussing the travails of the young and hip. Still, even when dressed in Swedish sneakers and breakbeats, pain is still pain. And Nightsongs has its share.
"Stars on the Ceiling" equates falling in love with staring-- naturally-- at the ceiling, while a blanket of horns mourn beneath the vocal. "My Radio," a fine entry in the music-as-salve-for-young-woes genre, lays thudding drum machines under languid backing vocals and yet another of the album's astonishingly good horn parts, undercutting the wistful quality of the melody with a kind of unmentionable malice.
Not that they don't get around to mentioning the malice, eventually. "The Very Thing" might sound a little like Everything but the Girl-- all acoustic guitars and chimy piano-- but it's a shockingly close-to-the-bone tale of domestic collapse, narrated by a husband and father who can't be categorized as heavy or hero: his kid "put a light in front of [h]im," but his wife is, apparently, a whore.
Like everything here, "Very" is toned in shades of grey. The fear-of-success anthem "Write What You Know," and the admiration-unto-envy-unto-murderous-rage story of "International Rock Star," are equal parts sugar (Chris Seligman's music and arrangements) and spite (Torquil Campbell's English-tinged vocals and lyrics). By comparison with the rest of this gallery, even the narrator of should-be club hit "Liar," perhaps a serial killer, doesn't come off looking all that terrible.
All this vaguely satiric venom doesn't tell the whole story, though. Stars aren't Momus with a bigger recording budget any more than they're the American Depeche Mode. There are songs here brimming with string sections and lyrics that prove that even people who are let in discos for free sometimes miss departed friends. In short, rather than delivering on the slick promise of their sound with expected vapidity, Nightsongs is a deeply felt album, hidden in what ought to be empty clothes. As with any good piece of candy, there are razor blades hidden within.
Stars may be young and good-looking, and they probably don't turn their nose up at expensive pants. They get laid so often they can hardly walk. And they want so badly to go dancing. They'd probably take you with them if they could just get off their knees, brush those goddamn expensive pants off, and stop crying their eyes out.
