If there’s one thing Canadian quintet Stars has been able to do for the entire duration of its 10-year run it’s make us sigh wistfully over beautifully crafted lyrics and gorgeous, blooming melodies. Since 2007’s In Our Bedroom After The War, the band members (many of whom moonlight as Broken Social Scene players) scattered for a while to work on some very un-Stars-like solo and side projects. However, rest assured that just-released fifth full-length, The Five Ghosts (Vagrant/Soft Revolution), is Stars still being heartbreakingly Stars, with an underlying theme of mortality featuring lyrics that focus on love in a “til death do us part” kind of way. Prepare to swoon when you see them play the album live on their tour of Europe and North America this fall. Evan Cranley, Torquil Campbell, Amy Millan, Chris Seligman and Patrick McGee are guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with Cranley.
Torquil: The show 48 Hours Mystery is a goldmine of suburban psychopathology. The inherent why in these tales of perfect husbands and wives in pesticide-green neighbourhoods quietly plotting and executing the murder of their spouses fascinates me. This defnitely falls into the same twilight as Patricia Highsmith‘s work. Why am I so obsessed with the domestic murder? Because it operates on the basic premise of good narrative: You can’t believe these people actually do this shit. And the story of their lives becomes a big “why?” The why, the question; there will be always be a story inside a question. Plus I have to give credit to the show itself, which creates a kind of noirish paranoid tone, building and building the why until you acutally begin to question whether these murderers are guilty. It’s good fun on a cold wet afternoon. And there are so many of those.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khs7SC8mln4
