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Review: Stars, 'There Is No Love In Fluorescent Light'

Note: NPR's First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still .


Since 2000, Stars' music has cycled through many styles and sounds, from orchestral pop to hyperactive dance-floor numbers. But a clear vision has always remained at its core: The Montreal band writes about love that's been compromised or curdled or otherwise scuffed-up in the living of lives. An undercurrent of political outrage seeps to the fore every now and then, but the meat of Stars' music lies in the thorny interpersonal entanglements of lovers who strive — to forget, to remember, to engage and disengage.

The title of Stars' new album, There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light, references the idea — embraced in the deliriously catchy "Fluorescent Light" — that connections wilt when they're not taken outside and fed a bit of adventure. It forms a useful mission statement, especially when set against songs in which Amy Millan and Torquil Campbell take turns giving voice to unmet expectations ("Privilege"), paranoia ("Losing You"), reclusion ("Alone"), a need to flee the past ("California, I Love That Name"), and so on.

It's meaningful that all that darkness and conflict is packaged with a title that celebrates risk and resiliency. Stars' members have spent the past 17 years ruminating on the many and varied ways our hearts can get kicked around, but their songs still beg us to head back outside for more.

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Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)