Stereolab are up to their eleventh album with ‘Chemical Chords’ but their sound remains as youthful as ever. A collection of 14 “purposefully short, dense, fast pop songs”, as the ‘Lab’s Time Gane has it, the record is a vibrant vibraphonic ride that moves from the breezy ‘Neon Beanbag’ to the Beatles-ey ‘Vortical Phonotheque’ via Motown percussion, sweeping orchestral soundtracks and, in ‘Daisy Click Clack’, some decidedly pub-style tinklings on the Old Joanna.
It’s a very warm record, with strings and brass unashamedly cropping up all over the place, but, in Laetitia Sadier’s French-toned phrasing, they still have an ice-cool pitch perfect weapon at their disposal. What’s more surprising is that all this charm has sprung from a seemingly self-imposed direction put on the record from the outset, in that Gane based the songs on around seventy drum loops, improvising chord sequences around them and gradually building up the layers into songs. An experiment, for sure, but it’s not made for as experimental an album as you may think.
The fab indie-pop of ‘Valley Hi!’, for example (which in one part manages to sound like a section from Resigned by Blur), and the superb fuzz-bass of ‘Pop Molecule’ make for a record that really wears its pop sensibilities on its sleeve. The things is, Stereolab know how to work the sensibilities of the best of Pop – be it from the 60s (as in ‘Cellulose Sunshine’) or later – into great music. The shifting time signatures of ‘Fractal Dream of a Thing’ seem indicative of a band confident enough to play simple, joyous melody through a distinctly more avant-garde framework.
It’s beautifully easy listening but, as with their best records, it contains exactly the right amount of French resistance.
Top Tracks: ‘Valley Hi!’, ‘Pop Molecule’, ‘Fractal Dream of a Thing’
Released 18/08/2008 on 4AD
