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In Our Bedroom After the War
Artist: Stars
Label: Arts and Crafts
13 tracks		  
 In Our Bedroom After the War is the eagerly-awaited follow up to Stars’ stellar 2004 indie-pop release, Set Yourself On Fire.  Released early through download from the band’s label’s website (and iTunes), fans of the band have the opportunity to satiate their longing for new material months before the new album’s official release.  It was a bold move on the part of the band, and a nice surprise in itself – an anticipated album still some ways off was suddenly available now, and for fans, it’s like waking up one morning and realizing that it’s your birthday. 

In Our Bedroom After the War is a gorgeous album at surface level.  It is an uplifting, gentle-hearted and straight-forward release, carried often by piano accompaniment and light touches of synths, its appeal always dominated by the lovely vocal deliveries of the male and female lead singers whose voices wrap together warmly throughout.  If you can remain at this level, you may be quite happy with this release – mid-tempo ballads, sweet love songs, and peaceful portraits of life after the storm and all. It’s when you dive a bit further that a slight sense of emptiness begins to creep up. 

There is a feeling that In Our Bedroom After the War is missing something.  A layer musically, sharpness lyrically, an ingredient of inspiration in production; this is an album that needed to spend a bit longer in the making.  It is superbly consistent from start to finish, with only two or three dry tracks that even on their own still retain a hook or two.   What is special about this release is its focus on peace and the varying experiences of the people, once involved in and fighting or suffering through, the tumult that took place before.  The quiet and the calm of the return to daily life, the reemergence of the status quo.  Things are back to normal, and so are Stars. 

And maybe, then, the concept is the problem.  “Lift your head, look out the window, stay  at way for the rest of the day and watch the time go…” they sing in the closing title-track, the same imagery from the closing song, “Calendar Girl”, in their previous album.  It’s merely a retread of where they have been before, and more disheartening still, a retreat as an album from the steps forward they had made in their last work.  I still like this album and find things to appreciate about it, but I cannot say that everyone, even fans, will like it as much as their other work.  Some may even find it a sad disappointment.   Still recommended, but not as enthusiastically as I wished I could. 

Jonathan Avants 8/8/07