Stereolab
Instant Holograms on Metal Film
DUOPHONIC UHF/WARP
ABOVE THE CURRENT
With their first new album in fifteen years, Stereolab co-creators Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier do what they’ve done best since 1990: be Stereolab. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Rendering avant-garde art-pop as something radically old yet experimentally new, bathing it in bachelor-pad lounge instrumentalism (their patented mix of ancient Vox and Farfisa organs, with wheezing vintage Moogs) and drone intonation, while kicking it up a notch with motorik rhythm and other oblong time signatures and topping it all off with sing-song-y vocals, all apparently written and recorded in haste—who else does that? Could anyone else sound like 1994’s Mars Audiac Quintet (other than, perhaps, another interplanetary five-piece), or utilize titles such as Dots and Loops, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, or Sound-Dust and mean exactly that—host melodies or moods quite so aptly titled?
From the first track released as a single for Instant Holograms on Metal Film—the ethereally extraterrestrial “Aerial Troubles”—through to the new album’s final hymn, “If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt.2,” song author Gane, lead vocalist Sadler, and the rest of the Stereolab team (including longtime drummer Andy Ramsay, vibraphonist Joseph Watson, and their newest member, bassist Xavier Muñoz Guimera) approach their music like Apollo astronauts who’ve been on the moon before and wouldn’t mind giving Jupiter a turn. The dustily electric ambience of “Mystical Plosives,” the Francophilic whimsy and woe of “Melodie Is a Wound” and “Le Coeur Et La Force,” the whatever-ness of “Electrified Teenybop!”—each of these moments spins on an axis of subtly infectious (“transmissible” may be a better word) refrains, eerie-yet-inviting vocals, and gently askew rhythmic pulsations.
Better still, while it sounds like the Stereolab of old, Instant Holograms on Metal Film additionally manages to sound like a Stereolab of the new and undiscovered, which is a pretty neat trick all the way around.
