Stereolab, Chemical Chords

by Pierre Gerard-Marchant
08/19/2008

I have to confess that Stereolab is one of the 90s bands I completely overlooked at the time. I had read their name in the music press, but their drony debut had left me uninspired after the emergence of bands like Lush or Ride.

I also wasn't especially impressed by their loungier follow-ups at a time where electronic music was more groundbreaking. It wasn't until the wee hours of a winter morning in 2003 that I realized that the soundtrack of the chilled-out conversation I had been having with a friend was the Stereolab album Sound Dust, released two years earlier. So I dug into friends' record collections and kindled a relationship with Stereolab that turned out to be lasting.

Coincidentally, 2003 was a transitional time for the Stereolab. One of their two vocalists, Mary Hansen, had just died in a traffic accident. The two founders, Laetitita Sadier and Tim Gane, had also put an halt to their personal relationship and got more and more involved with side-projects: Sadier's all-french Monade released three albums from 2003 until last March's Monstre Cosmic, while Gane himself was siding with long-time Stereolab collaborator and ex- regular member Sean O'Hagan (Microdisney, High Llamas) to write the original soundtrack of the French movie La Vie d'Artiste (2007). Interestingly, neither Sadier nor Gane strayed far from the sound of their common project.

Stereolab remained nevertheless quite productive as a group during the last five years, from the EP Instant 0 of the Universe in 2003 to the album Margarine Eclipse in 2004, the compilations Oscillons from the Anti-Sun (2005) and Serene Velocity (2006), and the demi-dozen of 7" singles collected in Fab Four Suture (2006), all leading to today's new album Chemical Chords.

If Chemical Chords were to be summarized in three words, they would be classic, compact and consistent. Since the very first measures of the bouncy "Neon Bag," we are unmistakably back on familiar Stereolab ground. If you never heard of the band, the album is an ideal introduction. Picture the sound of the 21st century as imagined in a sci-fi movie from the late 60s.

The songs usually follow the same standard template: a simple beat coated with the combination of Sadier's characteristic vocals and bilingual lyrics and a very 60s sounding bass, finally topped by O'Hagan's lush brass and string arrangements. However, Chemical Chords as a whole is poppier, with almost none of the complex melodic ruptures of the precedent albums. A notable exception is "Pop Molecule (Molecular Pop 1)," based on a sample looped over and over, reversed and eventually replicated in studio by the band, and feels a lot like the lost C-side of "Kiberneticka Babicka." Gane himself recognizes that is a collection of "purposefully short, dense, fast pop songs."

Fast is the effective term: the average song clocks at 3:26, against 4:28 for Margarine Eclipse and 5:15 for Sound Dust. From the 32 tracks initially recorded, only 14 made the final cut, and some of them, such as "Valley Hi!," got edited to half their initial length.

The analogy with a movie soundtrack is obvious on the title track, which was partly composed along La Vie d'Artiste, but also on the last track, "Vortical Phonoteque," sounding a lot of Mellow's CQ soundtrack. At times, Chemical Chords reminds me of Death By Chocolate, Left Banke, the Vannier of Melody Nelson or even simply the Beatles. However, it is rather pointless to try and detect influences in the music of Stereolab, as it would reduce it to the sum of its parts.

There is far more than that, though, as "the influences on Stereolab are also Stereolab." Stereolab are often presented as a Marxist group. Sadier doesn't hide her leftist political inclination, the title of the first album of Monade, Socialisme ou Barbarie was the name of a libertarian Marxist group funded by Castoriadis. But here again, attempting to stick a label to the band is futile.

Only one song on Chemical Chords is overtly politically liberal, "Nous Vous Demandons Pardon" (We ask for your pardon), a reflection on the fate of minorities in France and the disregard the French government has for them. The album was recorded in Bordeaux, FR, where Sadier lives most of the time and where Stereolab had built a studio in 2002. The French connection is therefore more pregnant.

Over their 15 year career, Stereolab has managed to capture the zeitgeist, assimilate it and create a musical universe which is solely theirs. Luckily, they invite us at regular intervals. And now, I can't imagine a world without them.