Personnel: Amy Millan (vocals, guitar); Torquil Campbell (vocals, trumpet, keyboards); Evan Cranley (guitar, trombone, bass synthesizer, drums, percussion); James Shaw (guitar); Rachel Moody, Lana Tomlin (violin); Markia Anthony Shaw (viola); Anne Marie Leblanc (cello); Eric Hove (saxophone); Chris Seligman (French horn, keyboards); Pat McGee (glockenspiel, drums, percussion).

Audio Mixer: Tony Hoffer.

Liner Note Author: Ibolya Kaslik.

Recording information: Studio Plateau.

The artwork for Stars' Set Yourself on Fire is eye-catching and dramatic, like a protest painting or Keith Haring subway drawing. And that's before you find the inside shot of a woman in a ski mask and little else, contemplating a flaming hand torch. The art direction's boldness complements the maturity in Stars' music, where nothing's just indie pop and string arrangements sound as perfect as the keyboards. Vocalists Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan enunciate every word with careful precision, and they sing of remembered high-school romances, dead ex-lovers, and drunk current ones in basic but powerfully evocative language. It's a twentysomething life, told in short story form. In opener "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead," Campbell and Millan's characters don't rekindle their relationship, but they don't apologize for its end, either. "I'm not sorry I met you," they harmonize. "I'm not sorry it's over/I'm not sorry there's nothing to save," and the song's strings and brass build to a surging outro that's the wordless acknowledgement of everything they had. The title track is augmented by strings of its own, keening dizzily in the background of an undeniable electronic pop pulse, and "What I'm Trying to Say" does the same thing, but replaces the strings with electric guitar. "Reunion"'s near-perfect guitar pop brings to mind Spoon, and mid-album mates "Sleep Tonight" and "First Five Times" have different views on the intent of (and locations for) modern romance. The songs blend trumpet, keyboard effects, acoustic guitar, and electronic and analog percussion for an intelligent pop sound that doesn't need bells and whistles to be unique. Stars rely instead on melody, charisma, and lyrics as sharp as any modern essayist, and it's all they need to sell the quiet grandness of Set Yourself On Fire. ~ Johnny Loftus

With 2005's SET YOURSELF ON FIRE, the Montreal ensemble Stars grows new blooms from out of its sturdy electro-pop stem. This is largely thanks to the addition of a real drummer (Pat McGee), who opens things up for the band's third full-length album. The raised hand on the cover might lead one to take this record for an angry political outcry, but if so, it's the sort one makes while falling in love at a college rally.

Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan trade vocal duties and combine on rich harmonies over alt-rock frameworks painted with thick electronic pulses, sweeping horn and string sections, bass, cello, harmonica, and electric guitar. It's a combination big enough to encompass both the melodramatic grandeur of teenage emotions and the awareness that such feelings are unreliable. Like their Canadian brethren Broken Social Scene (bassist Evan Cranley plays in both bands), Stars freely collapses pop music's pigeonholes into one rich, new-yet-familiar sound. "He Lied About Death" takes a few passing jabs at George W. Bush, but this band knows their best contribution to the cause is crafting epic love songs for the people to cry and dance to, and they contribute very well with SET YOURSELF ON FIRE.