Grade: A-
Gently astounding describes Stars' latest, a record that's borderline-brilliant but has the good sense to let you find that out for yourself.
Set Yourself on Fire will lure you in with its seemingly innocuous melodies and pitch-perfect harmonies (courtesy vocalists Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan), and it's a good four or five tracks before it occurs to you that none of its dozen instruments have hit a coarse note.
It's roughly then that your mild admiration turns to awestruck genuflection. Set Yourself on Fire doesn't feel transitional , but does seem to largely be about transition. It's a beautiful album; its songs like 13 heartbreaking lullabies that chronicle the evolution of our perception in spite of memory: "Collapsed in the act of just being here"— between lovers, between jobs, between whatever, waiting for things to happen and remembering those that have.
If music's greatest power is its ability to make you feel, maybe the thing to be said for Stars is that they've captured the act of feeling. It will astound you. Gently.