When an album starts off with each member of the band announcing "I am ____, and this is my heart," you should probably know straight off what you're getting into. The key word here would be "heart" (not coincidentally the name of the album), as in "wears on his sleeve" or "in her mouth" or "-shaped candies with cute little phrases on them." Stars have come to rock the master of your cardiovascular system, and if you're not prepared to accommodate a healthy serving of lyrical earnestness, you should probably just Remove All from your Winamp and go play some street hockey, you manly man you.
Fortunately for whoever remains, that leadoff track ("What the Snowman Learned About Love"-- see what I'm saying?) then supernovas into a synthy planetarium soundtrack worthy of M83 before scaling back to a delicate sing-song in the vein of Broken Social Scene's "Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl". It's a fitting overture to a strong pop album that effortlessly shifts from bombastic chamber to plink-plink twee over eleven songs, blissfully unburdened by the ambition to sound particularly new or different. In fact, I doubt the band would even mind much being referred to as a Canadian Belle & Sebastian, albeit a B&S; with more 80s synth-- which, come to think of it, might just be what the new Trevor Horn-mentored Belles will sound like.
But one song form Belle & Sebastian were never real strong with was the boy/girl conversational duet (think "Don't You Want Me?"), and Stars are happy to fill the void. "Elevator Love Letter" puts a jangly frame around urban shyness-- she's a rich girl, he's hot for the rich girl, both have spent too much time under florescent lights. "Romantic Comedy" is a domestic disintegration dialogue set to perky acoustic guitar runs and accordion. If the subject matter sounds a bit Hallmark, well, it is, but it's so persistently romantic that it should just about reach the level of excusably cornball for emotion-arbiters, like the video for Air's "All I Need" or the final scene from Field of Dreams.
Meanwhile, the group coasts on a good amount of orchestral carpets: "Time Can Never Kill the True Heart" juxtaposes the quartet with very-very-lite techno programming; "Look Up" is plausible Delgados forgery, thanks to smoky Amy Millan vocals. But even when stripped of symphonic accouterments the act doesn't wilt; the polite high range of part-time actor Torquil Campbell works wonders in "The Woods" with just a french horn and an answering machine message for company. Only when the group tries to develop some sort of awkward dark edge (the uncomfortably dreary lyrics of "Death to Death") or the sound gets nudged off the MOR cliff (greasy-slick "The Life Effect") does Heart skip a beat, become clogged, or experience any other negative heart pun of your choice.
Chalk it up perhaps to another case of Pitchfork Canuckophilia, but Stars comes as yet another Montreal act to keep the indie pop dream alive in '03. Less all over the map than the Voltron-like Broken Social Scene, and without the fetishist spice that off-kilters the otherwise straight-shooting pop of The Hidden Cameras, Stars could very easily be overlooked, or avoided like a couple prone to PDA. But as of yet we don't have immigration quotas on music from the Great White North, and Heart is a valuable pop record for those of us whose cardiac muscle hasn't stained completely black like that of, I dunno, Chris Ott.
