Stereolab

Appeared on Mon 15 Dec 08 @ The Black Box | Belfast (with special guests Sky Larkin)

Cult band Stereolab return with their 11th studio album 'Chemical Chords' this month and a UK and Ireland tour in December. Considered as one of the first post-rock outfits, their sound encompasses krautrock, Brazilian tropicalia, 50s lounge, French pop, free jazz and art rock in a manner that is utterly fresh and uniquely their own.

In an admiring review of their 2004 album Margarine Eclipse, Spin magazine hailed Stereolab as one of pop’s 50 most influential ensembles. “No one can do beautiful, energising crossover pop like Stereolab,” concurred The Independent.

Indeed, over fifteen prolific years of qualitatively consistent output, Stereolab have accrued a vast, peerless cache of work, hallmarked by a unique, carefully evolving but instantly recognizable sonic signature. In addition to over a dozen glittering LPs, their back catalogue is littered with fan-pleasing gems: limited editions, one-off collaborations, split singles et al. In the process they’ve galvanised an extensive, staunchly loyal international fanbase; become a byword for playful, stylish excellence; struck a blow for the feminisation of rock and booked a permanent seat at experimental pop’s high table.

Theirs is a rich, overflowing palette, readily able to blur the gulf between Os Mutantes and the BBC Radiophonic Orchestra; merge Krzysztof Komeda with the Velvet Underground, Francoise Hardy with Neu! and Burt Bacharach with Esquivel. A super-deluxe blend, in other words, with ingredients plucked assiduously from pop’s coolest outposts: 50’s lounge pop, Rive Gauche chanson, Brazilian tropicalia, North American art rock, East European film music, Krautrock. hi-fi test recordings, library music and more. Somehow they distil these apparently incongruent components into an ageless exotica that is all their own.

Sessions for ‘Chemical Chords’ (4AD Records) began in the spring of 2007 as “a series of about seventy tiny drum loops” on top of which Tim Gane would dub improvised chord sequences using piano and vibraphone, “building them up from there – later slowing the tracks down or speeding them up - a totally new way of doing songs for us…” With typically prolificacy, the band laboured over the summer at Instant 0, helping transform these blueprints into 32 luminous new songs, with keyboardist/technician Joe Watson manning the mixing desk. Half the new repertoire was selected for the forthcoming Chemical Chords opus (Gane is currently mixing the remainder for future releases) – an album which, for all the breathless spontaneity of its invention, is arguably the band’s tautest, most highly focused work this century. Being released by Duophonic UHF Disks / 4AD, it’s a collection of “purposefully short, dense, fast pop songs,” according to Gane, brimming with Motown-like drums, Sean O’Hagan’s finest baroque-pop brass and string arrangements and etched with some of Laetitia Sadier’s most eloquent, mellifluous vocal performances to date, it is, nonetheless, classic Stereolab; like all their best work, a perfect equipoise between an implausibly cool past and a shamelessly exotic future.

with special guests Sky Larkin

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