It’s been a little over two months since Canadian band Stars released their fitth album The Five Ghosts – to mixed reviews.

It was labeled a ‘5.7’ by Pitchfork and described as “limp” by Drowned in Sound, however, as front man Torquil Campbell explains, reviews don’t really mean shit these days.

According to Campbell, the nature of the internet and the concept of ‘rating’ an album has reduced reviews to “some half-assed, smarmy, pissy remark about how they’re up, they’re down, they’re back, they’re not back, they failed, they succeeded!”

So, rather than have you read about what some boring music journo thinks about Stars, Campbell was kind enough to provide us with an honest insight into the band, minus any smarm and “press kit factoids”.

You’ve survived the first few weeks following the release of your latest album The Five Ghosts, how has it been going so far?
It’s been going great. We did a tour of North America leading up to the release date during which we played the whole album front to back all the way through before anyone had heard it, and then we’d play another set of songs that people had chosen online to hear in each city, so that was an amazing experience, it was really fun, it was a really different way of playing a show and the audience came prepared to listen to the show in a different way and we had a really nice time of it. It was smaller rooms than we’re used to playing and the whole thing was very much a kind of a reminder of why we do it and why we’re lucky. So, it was nice.

I really like the idea that you got fans to vote for songs that they wanted to hear. Were you happy with their choices though?
I was happy with them because I didn’t have to learn, you know, any obscure songs that I’d completely forgotten about. I guess it was quite predictable actually what they’d choose. I mean it was nice to know that we were playing the right songs already. Yeah, you know, if you’re in a band and you have even one song that people want to hear you should just thank your lucky stars and get on with playing it

You’ve described The Five Ghosts as dance music for when you want to dance after something sad happens to you. I don’t know if you were just being a bit tongue in cheek about that or if that’s really how you feel about it, but is that a good way to sum it up?
Certainly, yeah, I think that was a big focus for us was we wanted to make a record with live electronic drums, in other words Pat [McGee] was playing electronic drum kits. We wanted to make a record with analogue synthesizers and we wanted to make a dance record because that’s a lot of what we listen to is people and what we love.

But I think that we always feel compelled to find tension in pop music and for us you know because we make quite light music we try and find the darkness in the stories that surround that music, in the sonic palette I guess of the music. In other words, I think a lot of our project is to write very very lovely, very easy to digest songs and then try to make them hard to take, in a strange way.

Do you think it’s easier to sell those darker lyrics through pop music?
Well, I don’t know if it is easier because I think, actually, people maybe don’t listen to lyrics all that much. There are certain people who listen to lyrics, but generally music is more powerful than words.

I think most of what people get from a song, now I’m speaking generally here of course, but what people get from a song is coming from the rhythm and the melody, and what’s happening in their brain when they’re hearing those tonalities and those rhythms interacting with each other, and words are a part of that because words are percussive they make sound.

You asked Set Yourself on Fire producer Tom McFall back for this album, he skipped the last one. Why him, what was the decision to have him re-join?
He’s worked with REM and U2 and Snow Patrol and all kinds of massive bands, so he’s had that big studio experience and he’s an amazingly articulate guy about music, and someone who you very much feel has no agenda. He’s a gentleman. He doesn’t need to be the big man in the room and therefore one’s automatic impulse it to make him that. He’s a humble man, and in being humble he can be a leader.

He’s our guy, if you’re lucky enough as a band to find your person who is your producer then I think what we learned is you stick with him, and I can’t really imagine we’ll probably make another record without Tom unless he gets bored of working with us.

If it’s not broken don’t fix it.
Yeah, and we tried, on In Our Bedroom, we tried different things and I think we love a lot of what that record is, but I think a lot of it was people trying to find a different path to something that maybe really wasn’t necessary to find. So the process of making Five Ghosts for us was to I guess get back a little bit, back onto the path that we’d set out for ourselves 10 years ago. Essentially it’s that’s we’re a sad disco band, that’s what we do, we write sad disco.

I wanted to bring up something from the time of In Our Bedroom. It was given a not so favorable review by Pitchfork and as a lot of people would know that you disagreed with that.
I generally don’t talk about this because it’s so inside baseball and so solipsistic and so bloody boring, but the one thing I will say is that is was actually quite a favorable review and that’s not what I was taking issue with. What I was taking issue with was a kind of ethos that I continue to see creeping in to the way people talk about music on the internet, which is uncivil and it’s unthoughtful. You know, he didn’t talk about the record. He talked about my acting career as a 10 year old, and what I wrote was idiotic, and pop music is idiotic and I do these things because I think kids need idiotic people in bands to do idiotic things. That’s part of my job, to pick fights with journalists and to say outrageous things.

Also, I guess for me, I think that the internet has a way of parsing things until they don’t really have any mystery or any meaning or any sex or any kind of romance anymore. It doesn’t exclusively do that, but it can do that and I think that reductiveness and that kind of smarmy-ness that creeps into the tone of a lot of writing about music now is too bad, it’s just sort of not very exciting.

If I was 17 and reading that it wouldn’t make me want to join a band, do you know what I mean? And ultimately I think music journalism is a part of pop music and it should take on the same responsibility as everyone else in pop music does, which is to reflect the dreams of young people, and be ridiculous, and be profound and be stupid and the same time, and not just sort of take a bunch of half-assed press kit factoids and write a review about how you kind of like the record but you’re too cool to admit it.

So you’ve kind of just answered my question, but I was going to ask whether you think reviews have a place.
Absolutely, I mean I read Pitchfork and I think they’ve introduced me to a lot of great music. You know, I read all kinds of blogs, I love music journalism and I’ve subscribe to fucking NME for 15 years, from the time I was 12. That’s how you find out about bands.

People write about bands and they excite you about bands, but what I don’t think is helpful, and what I think is really ultimately what makes Pitchfork something that is as bad for music as it has been good, is this scoring thing because it plays into a basic human rule, which is human beings are lazy and like being told what to think and what to do, and if you give them a system by which they can respond they’ll accept it.

Right? So if something says 2.3, they won’t read the review, they won’t listen to the music, the record will become a 2.3, or a 9.4, you know what I mean? So that to me is kind of an insult to the journalist who’s critiqued then follow that score, because you’ve already rendered anything they’ve written kind of unimportant, because the score is what people are going to remember. The score is what people are going to talk about. When you go see a baseball game, you don’t say, “What was the pitcher like in the 7th inning? I mean how were those curveballs coming in, were they graceful? Did they move you?” You say “What was the score of the game?”

I don’t think music should be experienced like that. So that’s my issue with reviews now is just that you’re getting less and less space too. I mean with journalists, especially in print, what used to be a 500 word review is now, as I’m sure you know, a 50 word review. So what are you reduced to? Some half-assed, smarmy, pissy remark about how they’re up, they’re down, they’re back, they’re not back, they failed, they succeeded! You know, it’s not really that interesting.

I’ve read that you don’t really think you’re a musician. I mean you are, obviously, but hypothetically if you weren’t, what would you be doing?
Well I’d probably be acting, which is what I did for 27 years of my life.

It’s weird you should ask me that though because I really don’t want to go back to acting but what I do think I would ultimately like to do, because this can’t go on forever, God knows people will get tired of it soon enough, but I’d like to drive not a taxi but like a car that picks you up and takes you to the airport.

Like nice long trips, 45 minutes, you know? And people laugh, and I’m like that seems like a great job to me, put on some soft jazz and have one of those pine tree air fresheners and just drive really slowly and talk a lot about like how aliens are trying to take over the world and stuff, talk about conspiracy theories to your passengers.

And the merit of online reviews?
[Laughs] It’s like a performer and you don’t have to get any applause. A tip is the only measurement by which you’ve succeeded or failed. And reaching the destination safely. It’s a simple job. I like simple jobs.

Well you don’t have one, that’s for sure.
Well in some ways it is, you show up and you put on the monkey suit, sit and have a vodka tonic and jump around. That’s the easy part, that’s the part that rewards you. The part that’s not simple is like sitting in hotel lobbies waiting for other people to get there wondering what you’re doing with your life. But that’s true of any job I think. We spend so much of our modern lives wasting our time, it’s quite depressing.

Before you go, can you give us an indication of when you might be in Australia again?
I’ve heard rumors of March or May, so I’m really hoping that that’s true. We’ll definitely be back, there’s no question about it, but I think we’re trying to time it right in terms of getting out to Southeast Asia as well, but it’s all in the works and we always love coming there so we’re really glad that it’s getting some press over there because we really love being in Australia it’s one of our favourite places to play.