Dazzling above: Stars brings positive energy to the half-full hall.

Arising from the exceptional Montreal music scene of the early 2000s, indie pop band Stars remain one of the bands from that era that still manages to keep an elegant consistency between their albums.

Compared with their Montreal peers who take forever between albums (Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Godspeed You! Black Emperor), Stars manage to channel their lives into records every two years or so. Within their seven album discography, their themes change and their bodies pace with age, but they still retain a bright-but-morbid quality that is undeniably Stars.

In their first ever show in Indonesia, and their second visit to Southeast Asia in five years, the five-piece delivered a show that can be described as touching, nostalgic, welcoming and most of all, incredibly fun.

Opening act Scaller seemed like a perfect choice to open the Canadian group'€™s first show in their 2016 Asia tour. For one thing, their music is extremely reminiscent of fellow Canadian music icon Alanis Morissette. The vocals, and even the instrumentation, seemed to have transported the relatively youthful crowd back to their childhoods in the 1990s.

Stars took the stage with high spirits, and kept them high for the entirety of their set. Beginning with 2012'€™s '€œHold On When You Get Love'€ and '€œLet Go When You Give It'€, the shy but engaging crowd was swept away by the band'€™s positive energy. Not long after, however, vocalist and frontman Torquil Campbell showed signs of visible agony, as he seemed to struggle to sing in his trademark low voice.

Campbell'€™s voice had been shot by the 29-hour journey that he and the band took from the other side of the world in Canada, and struggled to even talk, let alone sing. But like the showman that he is, the occasional theatre actor and playwright took his predicament in stride, but constantly expressed his disappointment toward himself to the forgiving crowd.

It was probably the crowd'€™s understanding of his suffering that pushed the band'€™s set to become better as the night went on. It was a mix of old and new tracks, though the songs were derived mostly from their most recent album, 2014'€™s No One is Lost. Cuts ranging way back to 2002'€™s Heart, 2004'€™s Set Yourself on Fire and 2007'€™s In the Bedroom After the War were also brought to these shores, bringing a lot of memories as well for the relatively mature crowd.

When 2002'€™s Elevator Love Letter was played, one audience member inside the half-full Soehanna Concert Hall happily remarked '€œThis song came out when I was like in elementary school!'€

Despite an ailing frontman and occasional problems with the sound system, the band kept their spirits high and managed to retain their positive energy throughout. It also helped that most of their set revolved around their most upbeat material, mostly taken from No One is Lost, Stars'€™ most danceable album to date.

Ageless Beauty: Amy Millan graces the Soehanna Hall in SCBD, South Jakarta, with her ageless voice.

Vocalist and guitarist Amy Millan sounds exactly the same on this album as she did 16 years ago on the band'€™s first album. It was as if her voice had managed to perfectly preserve its youthfulness, and it showed as well during her performance.

Throughout their career, Stars have always been a band that gets people dancing, but No One is Lost feels the most straightforward in its energetic dance rhythms.

'€œI guess the danceable vibe itself was helped by the fact that we recorded it above this gay disco in Montreal. The disco music emanating from below really affected the sound that we ended up with,'€ she said during an interview with The Jakarta Post.

But despite the positivity emanating from the record, No One is Lost was actually based on the tragic story of their manager contracting cancer in the period before the album was made. The manager, Owen, has since defeated his cancer, but the whole experience, Amy explained, manifested itself into an album that she described as '€œmagnetic and desperate'€.

'€œ[Owen'€™s predicament] was huge for us too. So we had to create this force against anything bad that was gonna happen. We had to live in blind hope. There'€™s something magnetic and desperate in this world, that'€™s why it'€™s called No One Is Lost,'€ she said.

Regarding the band, Amy describes Stars functioning more like a family rather than a musical group, after being together for more than 15 years. She noted that every one of their seven albums, from 2000'€™s Nightsongs to No One is Lost, had something to do with the events and feelings that the band experienced during the time of recording.

'€œWe'€™re influenced by what is around us, so every album has been a different story in our lives. You know like when dealing with things at home, or something happens, and you just have to work with that, it affects how you write,'€ she remarked.

Throughout the years, the band has experienced a plethora of sad and happy moments that can be heard in the music, from the death of Torquil Campbell'€™s father in 2010 to the birth of Amy'€™s first daughter. The experiences enriched the band'€™s music to deeply personal heights.

As the night winded down, Stars finished with an encore that started with Set Yourself On Fire'€™s two strongest tracks, '€œAgeless Beauty'€ and '€œCalendar Girl'€, and ended with their latest single '€œFrom the Night'€.

Having a short but impressive history of promoting acts, promoter Prasvana defied the odds by delivering a band capable of giving such a magnetic performance with as minimal an amount of technical issues as possible. Everybody in that Friday night room saw stars.

'€“ Photos by JP/Alden Tamborello

Popular

Indonesia on brink of losing Lake Toba’s Global Geopark status

Prabowo targets 20 million free meal recipients by mid-August

Dancing in harmony: 75 Years of Indonesia-Thailand diplomacy