I can see what’s coming…

…but I’m not saying it.

Montreal (by way of New York by way of Toronto) rockers Stars draped Baltimore’s Sonar with their lush and melodramatic brand of pop rock on Wednesday evening.

Stars mine the fruitful territory between visceral and grandiloquent. Vocalists Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan draw you into their dark and romanticized little world with a gut-twisting urgency that makes the Postal Service, and their acknowledged debt to the Human League, seem pale by comparison. This band seduces the audience, eliciting the feeling that you are both observer and participant in their tales of relationship woe. Their songs, while gray and occasionally post-apocalyptic, are too gorgeous to be grim or even apologetic. During Your Ex-Lover is Dead, Campbell and Millan sing, “I’m not sorry I met you/I’m not sorry it’s over/I’m not sorry there’s nothing to save” during the song’s coda while the instrumentation conveys the words’ furiously submerged underlying emotions in a way the vocalists cannot.

Rounding out the band are: keyboardist and founding member Chris Seligman, who looks strangely like he could be a regular bloke plucked from the crowd to live his dream of playing with his favorite band; drummer Patrick McGee, he of always interesting coiffure; and bassist Evan Cranley who, along with Amy Millan, was the unintended recipient of stage flowers that McGee kept trying to toss into the audience.

If you’re even a middling fan of the band or one of its song, you should go and see them in concert.  And if you’re not a middling fan, but pine wistfully for the artfully arranged sounds of smart 80s pop, this is a band for you.  Their recordings simply don’t capture the live feel of the songs, of Torquil Campbell standing on a monitor and furiously blowing on a trumpet, of Amy Millan singing like it just might be the very last night on Earth.  This is the sort of music that can induce people to do incredibly crazy or romantic or stupid things, depending upon your perspective.

Photo # 1 courtesy of Autumn De Wilde and NPR. Photo # 2 courtesy of my camera phone.