Songs straight from the apocalyptic heart
Moments into Stars’ lush album “Heart,” you think the sap starts to ooze. Each member of the Montreal quartet issues an introduction: “I am Evan, this is my heart; I am Amy, this is my heart,” and so on. Cute ... or not. By the end, “Heart” is neither precious nor overwrought, the band’s collection of sweets having folded the myth of love into songs that use melody as subterfuge and beauty as camouflage.
Perhaps no song illustrates the almost apocalyptic feel of emotional detachment better than “Elevator Love Letter,” a tune about love of, not in, an elevator. Beginning with a guitar strum that gives way to a slippery synth, then a chest-swelling bass line, the song climaxes with vocalist Amy Millan’s soaring “Elevator, elevator, take me home.”
Millan wrote the confessional when she was living in a Toronto high-rise, says bandmate Torquil Campbell, “and feeling a bit existential as she was looking out over the city on her way home.”
“It was originally called ‘Evening Anthem for the Office Worker’
“Beyond that, though, there’s something sad but beautiful about how people in today’s world make intimate connections with machines.”
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Stars, with the Dears and Giant Drag, Spaceland, 1717 Silver Lake Blvd., L.A. Today, 9 p.m. $12. (323) 661-4380.
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