Compared to her fellow Broken Social Scenesters, Amy Millan seems an unlikely candidate for a solo career. She possesses neither the mellifluous lilt of Leslie Feist nor the poetic gifts of Emily Haines; her brightest moments singing with Stars occur in songs like “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” and “Life 2: Unhappy Ending,” where she stands in stark, realistic contrast to the theatricality of co-vocalist Torquil Campbell. Perhaps success in the company of friends is the reason Millan highlights the collaborations that yielded Masters Of The Burial in the record’s press release: “Solo work,” she writes, “is a bit of a fib.”
Nevertheless, most of Masters is sung from a solo perspective. Someone’s done Millan wrong, and she searches throughout these sepia-toned songs for the direction and stability that will set her right. The music lover in Millan finds that stability in other people’s songs, most notably a cover of Death Cab For Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into The Dark.” The steel-guitar-soaked arrangement adds a bit of shuffle to the original, though a curious personal-pronoun swap in the chorus muddies the lyric’s sentiment. Still, it’s an appropriate choice for a record that’s much more focused on wistful nostalgia than romantic optimism—even Masters’ rosiest track, the skeletal “Day To Day,” makes space for the type of grounded advice Millan usually reserves for Campbell. Even when Millan is singing to herself, she’s wishing there was someone else in the room.