[review 2007: honourable mentions]

It all comes down to this: as much as I want to like In Our Bedroom After the War, it’s just not the album I was hoping it would be. That doesn’t make it bad at all, and actually there are a lot of good songs on the album. But if you’re hoping for a record that outdoes Set Yourself on Fire, keep looking.

Maybe that’s unfair to Stars, who’ve recorded an album that, like all their previous albums, takes a subtly different approach. Set Yourself on Fire was the Montreal band’s boldest and brightest statement to date. The one-two punch of “Your Ex-Lover is Dead” and the title track sounded grander and more luscious than everything off Heart, itself a more luxurious album than the almost-forgotten Nightsongs, and that trend continued throughout the album. By contrast, In Our Bedroom After the War reins things in a bit, choosing a more intimate and scaled-back approach.

I always imagined Stars as the musical equivalent of brash, foolhardy romantic proclamations, and I’ll point to “Soft Revolution” and the opening of “What the Snowman Learned About Love” (”Hi, I’m Amy, and this is my heart.”) as ample evidence that at one point in their career, they might’ve agreed. Even the way Torq sang and acted in concert had that stoic, damn-the-torpedoes attitude, like the band was going to war to fight for your freedom to love. Like so many movies set after wars, In Our Bedroom After the War is introspective, and though there’s no reason to suggest Stars can’t pull this off, it’s also not exactly their strong suit.

So we get intensely personal ballads like “Barricades,” where Torq reveals a hitherto unheard crooner side, and fit-for-AM-radio pop songs like “My Favourite Book” and “The Ghost of Genova Heights.” All these songs are excellent in their own right, once you remember that this album is not Set Yourself on Fire and was never intended to be. Where the new album begins to fall apart is in the last couple of tracks; “Life 2: The Unhappy Ending” only has the chorus to recommend it, and “Today Will Be Better, I Swear!” has even less. The album closes with the title track, which is almost entirely forgettable.

The real problem is that besides “Personal” and “Barricade,” it doesn’t feel like Stars has taken a whole lot of risks here. “My Favourite Book” is still one of my favourite tracks off the album, but I have to admit it’s not exactly groundbreaking material for the band. And the reason why “Personal” and “Barricade” feel like risks is because they run in the opposite direction from everything on Stars’ last album. They’re utterly naked songs, with no studio wizardry, lavish instrumentation or even much in the way of quirky lyricism to hide the emotional payload. By comparison the rest of the album feels a bit too easy, a bit too much like they’ve been there and done it before.

And that’s why I keep bringing up Set Yourself on Fire: In Our Bedroom After the War just hasn’t move far enough away from that blueprint to leave the inevitable comparisons behind, and so it will always live in the shadow of its bigger brother. (Or sister. I don’t know how you classify the gender of an album.) Forget Set Yourself on Fire exists and you have a very good Stars album, with a number of pleasant-sounding tunes like “Window Bird” and the aforementioned “My Favourite Book.” Concentrate on the differences between the two albums and you’ll still find plenty to like—besides “Personal” and “Barricade” there’s the odd falsetto-laced “The Ghost of Genova Heights.” And even when the album does take up motifs from its predecessor, like “Bitches in Tokyo” does “Ageless Beauty,” it occasionally hits its mark. So there’s plenty to like about In Our Bedroom After the War in the end. But…