Over a short span in the pulsing world of a woman
How we begin as a paste that builds into a base
I saw by the 24 hour neon light, the freckles on your armīut in the morning light when I watched your sleeping body 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.When we left the diner and walked into the night 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. 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. 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. Campbell gets a requisite U2-style burner on “Alone,” and it’s pretty glorious. Millan’s confident vocals on “Hope Avenue” make it sound like she could be a popstar in the vein of Robyn. The unwavering “yes” of Stars has deepened into a “maybe,” but the music still beams with conviction. “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. “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. 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. “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. The opening track “Privilege” is slinky and inviting, as Millan does slow flips around a silvery herringbone guitar. Words like “dream” and “love” are repeated until they lose all sense, or rather, infuse everything around them.
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. 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.Īiry and danceable, There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light revives our faith in Stars. Of course, in Stars’ music, lovers are also like TV: streamlined, composited, and dramatized with a cinematic splendor that would make Baz Luhrmann blush.
#VEIN OF STARS LYRICS TV#
(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. The greatness of their third album, 2004’s Set Yourself on Fire, is so unimpeachable that people forget about 2003’s Heart. 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.
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