Do You Trust Your Friends?

Listening to this album feels like attending a quiet after-party where the only people left are your closest friends, and everyone is too tired to dance but too awake to go home. It is a fascinating deconstruction of Stars' breakthrough record, Set Yourself on Fire, stripped of its grand, cinematic production and rebuilt with the idiosyncratic tools of their peers. The lush, interlocking vocals of Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan are still there, but they are often filtered through the glitchy electronics of Montag or the baroque arrangements of Owen Pallett. It is an album that rewards deep familiarity with the original material, offering a series of 'what if' scenarios that range from the hauntingly acoustic to the aggressively electronic.

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