The dreamy Montreal indie-pop band Stars put out one of the albums of the decade with 2004's romantic, beautiful "Set Yourself on Fire." Only three years later, the band revisits that album by allowing some of its musician pals to remix and rearrange each of the 13 tracks on the new "Do You Trust Your Friends?"
Under certain circumstances, this might seem like little more than a stopgap project, but the songs are so good, and the new treatments so sympathetic to the source material, that the final product transcends any charges of laziness or vanity. Today's song finds indie polymath Final Fantasy (Owen Pallett) transforming the shimmering "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" into something mysterious and desperate, replacing the original's coruscating guitar and cymbal swells with a luminous piano loop and some nervous violin interjections.
-- David Marchese
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