REVIEW: Stars
- Posted on February 1, 2008 2:46 PM
- 0 comments
Stars
Koko - London
29 January 2008
Review by Paul Beevers
Stars look delighted the second they step on stage at Koko tonight and it's not hard to see why. For a start you just know that they won't play a venue quite like this in their native Canada or anywhere else for that matter. The sheer majesty of Koko, a beautifully restored and resurrected Victorian music hall is truly breathtaking.
Tonight the place is packed to its vertigo-inducing rafters, which means 1500 people have turned out on a school night to watch a band who have not yet enjoyed any real commercial success in the U.K. Granted, a large portion of the audience are fellow Canadians but this is still an impressive headcount, and front man Torquil Campbell is gushingly grateful that so many people are here to greet him and his band.
For the uninitiated Stars are an impossible band to pigeonhole, especially with their predilection for complex songs, multiple melodies, shifting time signatures and dark lyrical themes. And yet they're equally adept at top notch breezy indie pop. Tonight's opener 'Ageless Beauty' is a case of the latter, redolent of Ride, The Primitives and early Primal Scream in equal measure. For the numerous 30-somethings in the audience who remember an indie scene pre-grunge and pre-Brit Pop this constitutes a good start.
And from thereon in the quality just never lets up. It helps when you have two lead singers (Campbell is accompanied by the divine Amy Millan) who are as vocally perfect on stage as on record. Tonight their lyrical interplay and harmonies are faultless. It also helps when you have incredibly tight band who can deliver these recordings perfectly in concert, and augment them with some neat, unexpected flourishes. An extra keyboard line here, a guitar melody there. Such little things make a big difference, especially when most of the audience are completely au fait with Stars’ diverse catalogue.
Stand out tracks tonight include early single ‘Elevator Love Letter’ where shimmering guitars, analogue synths and an exquisite chorus take us straight to indie pop Heaven and back. Elsewhere the euphoric ‘Take Me To The Riot’ is the closest they get to stadium rock, ‘My Favourite Book’ could be The Cardigans greatest hits squished into three minutes and ‘Window Bird’ is by turns fragile and foreboding with Millan’s vocal at it’s absolute sweetest.
Whether Stars will ever match their North American commercial success in the U.K is debatable. They certainly don’t have youth on their side, they’re not in least fashionable and their apparent contradictions (sweetness and light one moment, darkness and mystery the next) will keep them away from most daytime radio schedules.
If however you measure success based on the warmth of an audience towards the band, the way that warmth is reciprocated, the sheer quality of the performance and the sense of being in the right place at the right time, tonight Stars might just be the biggest band in the world.
Related links:
Stars listings and tickets.
Stars MySpace.
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