Stars
9:30 Club, Washington DC
February 8, 2025
I swear I’m not just trying to see Canadian bands since the return to authoritarian kleptocracy, but it’s seeming a bit like it.
I’ve loved Stars for a long time, but I didn’t listen to them at the peak of their recognition and influence, a moment in the indie chronology when Canada, especially Montreal, was the center of the music industry among Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Feist, and other compatriots (and collaborators) of Stars mainstays Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan.
The show at the 9:30 Club in February was billed as the 20th anniversary of 2005’s
Set Yourself on Fire, and hilariously Campbell thanked the audience, “for coming to see either our third or fourth best album,” disparaging perhaps the apex of Stars’ commercial and artistic impact. The band did all of
Set Yourself in sequence; the first side of
Set Yourself includes some of Stars’ most-beloved songs, from the opening glitched-out synthpop drama of “Your Ex-Lover is Dead” to the airy Millan feature “Ageless Beauty.” I hadn’t listened straight through
Set Yourself On Fire in a very long time — in my personal accounting, it’s perhaps their second-best overall with
In Our Bedroom After the War or
North in the running for the medal stand.
I’ve never been a huge lover of the “plays classic album in sequence” approach to a concert setlist. What works on an album might not maintain momentum in a live setting, and of course, there are reasons why a song might be relegated to side two, track four. (So the band can skip it on tour, probably.) The first side of
Set Yourself on Fire is nonstop indie bangers, but it's a really solid and varied record overall and there were worthy tracks from deep into side two that I had completely forgotten, like the orchestrated grandeur of “Celebration Guns” and “The First Five Times”’s reminiscence of an awkward teen courtship, which sounds like one of Stars’ frequent and self-conscious Smiths tributes.
The pacing of the set following the full performance of
Set Yourself was a bit puzzling. Stars has operated in two modes for much of the past decade-and-a-half: orchestral, immensely melodramatic pop, with alternating vocals by Millan and Campbell; and knowingly self-referential, but undeniable, dance floor material frequently undercut by a touch of autumnal melancholy, as if the band recognizes that they’re too old for clubbing and parties, but unable to give them up. For the second set, they threw both modes of their back catalogue into the mix — first with “
Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It,” a fantastic song from
The North in their ironic-dance floor mode, largely so Torquil Campbell could adapt one line to, “take the weakest thing in you, and then beat those fascists with it,” while gesturing vaguely toward the White House and the Capitol building. (Check the
drag queen-friendly official video, somewhat amazingly, all of Stars appear to be straight; two are married to each other and most are parents.) Like I said, fantastic song, but didn’t fit the aesthetics or the tone of
Set Yourself on Fire or the other tunes in the second set, which leaned heavily on indie melodrama like
In Our Bedroom’s “Take Me to the Riot,” the Victorian “Dead Hearts” from
Five Ghosts, and their beloved early single “Elevator Love Song,” from
Heart, one of Amy Millan’s career highlights.
The most current Stars’ record, 2022’s handsomely autumnal
From Capelton Hill, didn’t fit aesthetically into most of the set but the band included
its title track in the second encore, segueing somewhat awkwardly into one of Stars’ dance floor romps, “No One is Lost,” as the close to the evening.
Stars setlist courtesy setlist.fm
Most of the times I’ve seen Stars, they have invited a less-well-known Canadian artist to accompany them south of the 49th parallel. In this February show, they had
Kevin Devine, a long-running below-the-radar musician from Brooklyn, who was fine but whose songs didn’t stick, and
HOL!, whose set I missed completely.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2025 07:53AM by zwirnm.
