Stereolab
Instant Holograms On Metal Film
★★★★
DUOPHONIC UFH DISKS/WARP
A former Grange Hill star, a throng of spandex-clad dancers and a man gyrating in what seems to be a studded Roman centurion’s loincloth: Stereolab weren’t exactly playing to their high-minded home crowd the night they appeared on Channel 4’s notorious post-pub variety show The Word. Watch the footage 32 years later, and it’s hard to know what’s more ferocious – the full-pelt version of their 1993 track French Disko or the eye-rolling disdain singer Laetitia Sadier patently has for the whole scene. Yet the urgency transmitted through the cascading harmonies of Sadier and her bandmate Mary Hansen is undimmed, the message – “I say there are things still worth fighting for” – culminating in a single ringing call to arms: “La Resistance! La Resistance!”
Since their formation in 1990, Stereolab have always felt like a band in opposition – not the Wild One rebellion of traditional rock’n’roll, but a state of precise musical foment and pol-sci plotting. It’s very much in their blood. Guitarist and musical foreman Tim Gane spent most of the ’80s in proto-Manics firebrands McCarthy, while Sadier was born in Paris during the revolutionary tumult of May 1968, the perfect origin story for a woman who would one day cram an assessment of boom-bust capitalist systems into 1994 single Ping Pong (“It’s alright ’cos the historical pattern has shown/How the economical cycle tends to revolve/In a round of decades”).
Opening up new spaces has always felt like a vital part of the Stereolab mission, their Space Age Bachelor Pad not so much intended as a kitsch chick-magnet but a free-thinking research facility where they could experiment endlessly with their Bacharach-and-Debord pop, the Xerox polemics of riot grrrl, the radical exotica of Tropicália, their foundational Krautrock texts. It’s the right-on, artisanal take on billionaires trying to get to the moon: by reconstructing and remodelling precious artistic resources, they could create their own imaginative compounds, forge their own rules of engagement, all the while pushing for real-world change. (Emerging at the same time as shoegazing, Stereolab had notably little time for its blurry escapism).
Instant Holograms On Metal Film, their first new album since the Seine-side sunshine pop of 2008’s Chemical Chords and its 2010 overflow companion piece Not Music, makes it clear those adventuring impulses have not tarnished with time. “I’m the creator of this reality,” sings Sadier over the baroque music-box riffs of Vermona F Transistor, “not the joker who pretends a god to be.” Reconvening in 2019 to play live around the reissue of seven early albums – among them 1994’s Mars Audiac Quintet and 1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup – the group (now Gane, Sadier, drummer Andy Ramsay, bassist Xavi Muñoz Guimera and keyboardist Joe Watson) slowly gravitated towards the idea of making new music. It’s been recorded and engineered by Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas, a pleasing Chicago echo of their sterling Dots And Loops-era collaboration with Tortoise’s John McEntire.
The record begins with the appropriate start-up chime of Mystical Plosives, before setting out its downbeat stall with Aerial Troubles, an elegy for a world lost in malign static, struggling with its vertical hold. “The numbing is not/It is not working any more,” sings Sadier, but the track quickly escalates into compact, crunched-down energy burst, a refusal to lie down. If modernity is in the “palliative” stage, it argues, then it’s time to become midwives to a new way of living.
Stereolab have often been accused of being brain-in-a-jar cerebral, all up there for thinking despite the wow and flutter of their grooves and beats, or the emotional side shown on ode to parenthood People Do It All The Time (from 1999’s Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night). There is a real and immediate warmth to Instant Holograms On Metal Film, however, an unmistakable ripple of hope. The attention to detail demands you live in its present, whether that’s the exhilarating instrumental Electrified Teenybop!, or the dragged-out drum’n’bass coda of Esemplastic Creeping Eruption (not, despite the title, a Carcass cover).
There are still stentorian directives and fierce invective, especially on the wonky clockwork pop of Colour Television. An IBM Daisy Bell with AI enhancements, it attacks “the deluding promise of a middle class for all,” as the swaying beat moves towards lemming-like oblivion. Likewise, Melodie Is A Wound works itself up into a malfunctioning synthesizer blow-out, but Immortal Hands – featuring cornet from Ben LaMar Gay – strives to swap “ego skyscraper erect and collapsible/Nihilistic and vulgar” for love and nature.
This is a record that more frequently speaks and embodies the language of connection, of entwining and union, the clash between hard-edged politics and the beautiful fractals of their music less stringently juxtaposed than in earlier work. La Coeur Et La Force, beginning with a Rock Bottom shiver, waves its antenna into the air and sees what it can receive back, while the Tortoise-like syncopations of Transmuted Matter explore what it means to be “fully human/Fully divine” before sliding off into cosmic raptures. “It’s because I am you/It’s because you are me,” declares Sadier on the splashy yé-yé of If You Remember I Forgot How To Dream Part 1, while Part 2 refers to the need to explore the “rhizomic maze”, a term that comes from both botany and philosophy. It suggests networks and connections, its tangles and bulges of guitar and drum machine mimicking something growing in head-feeding new directions, a crop of sustaining roots or maybe a vast mycelial web.
The mainstream might have danced closer to them over the years – nobody needed to know their track The Flower Called Nowhere was Pharrell Williams’ choice of sex soundtrack – but Stereolab have never quite been absorbed. The music they make is still not easy – it’s a good bet that _Instant Holograms On Metal Film_will be the only record this year to feature the word “desuetude”. Yet they still have a rare ability to rearrange the world around them, pulling away the mundane scenery of everyday life, throwing new possibilities centre-stage, insisting there are still things worth fighting for.
Instant Holograms On Metal Film is out May 23 via Duophonic UFH Disks/Warp.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade
Tracklisting:
Mystical Plosives
Aerial Troubles
Melodie Is A Wound
Immortal Hands
Vermona F Transistor
Le Coeur Et La Force
Electrified Teenybop!
Transmuted Matter
Esemplastic Creeping Eruption
If You Remember I Forgot How To Dream Pt.1
Flashes From Everywhere
Colour Television
If You Remember I Forgot How To Dream Pt. 2
Get the latest issue of MOJO for the definitive verdict on all the month’s essential new releases, reissues, music books and films only in the latest issue of MOJO. More info and to order a copy HERE!
