Stars: Set Yourself on Fire [ARTS & CRAFTS]

Why you'll love it

This Arts & Crafts edition is a 180g pressing with the alternate vinyl cover art and a download card. "Ageless Beauty" became the band's breakthrough hit in Canada, the album was a Juno nominee for Alternative Album of the Year, and it holds a Metacritic score of 81.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Download card included
• Alternate vinyl cover art

About the album

Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan sing like two people mid-argument who both secretly know they're right, and Set Yourself on Fire is the record where that push and pull became the whole point. Stars had been around since 1999, but their third album, out on Toronto's Arts & Crafts, is the one that put them on the map on both sides of the border.

"Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" swells with strings, then turns into a duet of very polite heartbreak; it landed on The O.C. soundtrack and later on So You Think You Can Dance. "Ageless Beauty" is all chiming guitars and urgency, "Reunion" and "One More Night" shimmer, and "Calendar Girl" closes things on a big, bittersweet lift. Bulgarian composer Todor Kobakov wrote the string arrangements, and novelist Ibi Kaslik is quoted on the jacket.

Campbell, Millan and Evan Cranley also played in Broken Social Scene, so this is very much a family affair of Canadian indie. Few bands open an album with a song title that grim and then spend the next hour being this lovely about it.

Also at Kops: more Stars on vinyl · browse CDN Pop / Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Arts & Crafts (cat# A&C009), a reissue of the 2004 album.