Album: Stars, The Five Ghosts (Soft Revolution/Vagrant)

An offshoot of Montreal-based indie collective Broken Social Scene, Stars' lush indie-pop is here employed for a theme of ghosts, perhaps inspired by the antique double-exposure sleeve photo, whose sullen subject is surrounded by five indistinct faces.

The matter is pursued by tracks such as "I Died So I Could Haunt You", "He Dreams He's Awake" and the opening "Dead Hearts". The voices of Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan combine in a Deacon Blue/Prefab Sprout manner over a shoegazerly thrum of guitars and tentative piano, which elsewhere extends into gently insistent pulsing keyboards ("Wasted Daylight", "Fixed") or a more charmless electropop mode ("We Don't Want Your Body", "How Much More"), as if Stars were trying to straddle the divide between Coldplay and Lady Gaga.

DOWNLOAD THIS Dead Hearts; Wasted Daylight; Changes