The Aspidistra Files. Stars. 2001. Le Grand Magistery.

This quietly sung Canadian idyll recalls Olympia Washington’s incomparable Fleetwoods, who lovingly finessed the nuances of romantic tenderness with such adroitness of songcraft that they easily transcended the genre-bound constraints of their early rock and roll musical peers. What Stars does convincingly well with The Aspidistra Files is to demonstrate with poetic accuracy love’s eye opening mechanics; how your senses, alive with the potency of emotion, go about alerting you to your place in nature, within its commensurate prospect. The Aspidistra Files is a remarkably sane performance, confident in its clarity and expression of shared emotion, from a band with an innate sense of romantic melancholy. “You whisper sweet lies to me, and one of them will be true,” Stars vocalist Torquil Campbell sings in a moment of disquieting lucidity, and the significance of the lyric reveals love’s core paradox:  that, in order to tend to its countlessly surprising demands, being in love means occupying an endlessly complicated place of sobriety and awareness while simultaneously losing oneself to the heady, addictive effects of its loving cup. Seen another way, love is such a deeply personal awareness of both health and sickness itself that it’s even been written into our mythology of marriage. It’s the romantic beauty of watching a sky filled with doves making their way to an attic room for two, knowing that the room will soon be overrun with bacteria riddled waste. 

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