The Five Ghosts
The Toronto indie pop veterans follow their theatrical, big-room work with a more muted, grayer record.
For Stars, romance is always ridiculous. Each of the Canadian pop quintet’s four previous albums have mixed self-consciously overblown metaphors—with love manifesting itself as battles, resurrections, and blazes—and curiously specific scenes from relationship-focused procedural dramas. And so while The Five Ghosts neve…
Flaunting their sad and sassy pop that appears to have emerged fully formed from day one, the Canadian five-piece theatrically redefines cool with tales of love, death, and life in between.
Stars trade much of their cinematic atmospherics for simpler, punchier electro-pop on their fifth album, in turn, watering down their very creative aesthetic - and ultimately, their appeal.
The album falls somewhere between the murky waters of M83’s current shoegaze-glazed pop and Billy Corgan’s overly tweaked The Future Embrace sound.
Montreal's 80s-influenced indie types go all in for the melodrama on their fifth album, and while it's hugely pretty, it's airbrushed to the point of blandness, writes <strong>Dave Simpson</strong>
Stars - The Five Ghosts review: Stars release some of their most fluid and organic material to date.