Musical chemists—by which I mean fans, critics, and guys in white lab coats and thick glasses raising test tubes into the air and crying, “Eureka! And they said I was mad! Mad!”—tend to consider 1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup and 1997’s Dots and Loops the perfect distillation of the Anglo-French “post-rock” band Stereolab’s sound. An aurally sophisticated compound of Krautrock, jazz, lounge, funk, Brazilian, and 1960s pop elements, Stereolab’s music could rightfully be called retro-futuristic. It wasn’t, technically speaking, space age bachelor pad music—that was a far different musical phenomenon—but the phrase so perfectly encapsulated the Stereolab aesthetic they entitled a 1993 mini-LP The Groop Played “Space Age Bachelor Pad Music.”
I’m a musical chemist myself, but a radical one—the guy in the white lab coat in the previous paragraph everyone thinks should be in a straitjacket. Why? Because Stereolab’s easy listening leanings and later influences do nothing for me. I prefer the band’s very first records, when Krautrock was their preferred métier. Keep it simple, stupid is my motto, especially when simple puts you in the same league as such immortal German bands as Neu!, Can, Faust, Harmonia, and La Düsseldorf, amongst others.
I suppose I should mention Stereolab’s allegiance to the Situationist International and its critiques of advanced capitalism but frankly the word “Marxism” causes my eyes to glaze over, and last I checked Stereolab themselves are a product of advanced capitalism—I can’t walk into a record store and walk out with one of their albums without paying for it unless I’m a member of the Baader-Meinhof Group, whose critique of advanced capitalism involved taking it from the man rather than selling him albums full of didactic blather for profit.
Diatribe out of the way, let us turn to 1992’s Switched On, a compilation of Stereolab’s first three releases. The album is replete with songs that counter Lætitia Sadier’s and British music journalist Gina Morris’ lush and streamlined retro-pop vocals with Tim Gane’s hard rock guitar and the motorik beat that promises fun, fun, fun on the Autobahn, although it also includes quieter and less propulsive numbers along the lines of “High Expectation” and the first of the LP’s two versions of “Au Grand Jour.” But it stays well away from the lounge, and you won’t want to be holding a blue martini while songs like “The Light That Will Cease to Fail” are playing. They’ll jostle sophisticated booze all over your cocktail dress.
Opener “Super-Electric” lives up to its name—it’s a high-speed BMW ride down the world’s first super-expressway, with Sadier and Morris’ vocals there to sweeten the blur. “Doubt” opens with some brief Moog squiggle and is a pureed but still propulsive take on the motorik sound. What I first mistook as nonsense syllables are actually a repetition of the title, and the song’s dreamy feel is in direct contrast to its dry lyrical rhetoric: “Is it enough to show/How the nightmare works/So everyone will/Wake up, is it enough?” The first version of “Au Grand Jour” is a lovely affair and highlights the sweetness and light of the vocals. But you get more arid lyrical politics (“We need a shake and therefore demand more than the cold conclusion of reason/The only impossible thing is to delimit the impossible”) of the sort that make me hope the song will one day be used to sell dishwashing detergent.
“The Way Will Be Interesting” is slow jingle-jangle with cool vocal counterpoint and is really quite relaxing, like sitting in a hot tub with Guy Debord discussing the mediation of social relations through objects. Except that would be unspeakably tedious and I would probably drown myself. Fortunately the lyrics aren’t just more abstract agitprop—why, you’d almost think Stereolab are an offshoot of the Red Army Faction with sanguine lines like “Nothing at all can be expected/Except for the use of violence.” Not that they’d ever put their money where their mouth is, and thank Kropotkin—the last thing the world needs is lounge terrorism.
“Brittle” is a hard rocker with Ganes making a big guitar racket and tossing in lots of Moog squiggles as the song rockets along. He also takes a pair of solo turns on his (probably Engels-made) axe while Sadier and Morris do their usual butter-melting vocal routine to round off the song’s rough edges. “Contact” reminds me of a slower Velvet Underground tune (“New Age” comes to mind) and is all subtle drum work and Moog wash until the song builds and Sadier and Morris enter stage left to whisper sweet nonsense syllables.
The second “Au Grand Jour” is switched on Krautrock perfection, all momentum and horsepower with nary a curve in the road to Cologne. The song falls into the grand tradition that includes the Velvets, Feelies, Wedding Present and numerous others, but Stereolab contains multitudes, as they demonstrate on “High Expectation,” a slow drone over which Sadier repeats the refrain “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I’m sorry,” although the song’s tres chic and she has nothing to apologize for.
Closer “The Light That Will Cease to Fail” is the hardest driver on Switched On; Ganes repeats a gimungous guitar riff while Joe Dilworth pounds out that Krautrock 4/4 and it’s fucking brill, the only problem being it doesn’t go on forever, as in unto infinity. Or at the very minimum the sixteen minutes the Dandy Warhols dedicate to their super drone “16 Minutes” or the twelve-plus minute “Mother Sky” by Can or the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s eleven-minute “Straight Up and Down” or (the shortest but greatest of ‘em all) Neu!’s ten-minute “Hallogallo.”
Stereolab is just that—a stereo laboratory where a team of English and French sound scientists add this to that and that to this, creating in the process new and ever more complex musical compounds pleasing to the hipster ear. But I’m a fan of elegant simplicity, and dedicated to the Euclidean dictum that the straightest distance between two points is a straight line. Which I suppose makes me some sort of reactionary. But is it my fault Can’s “Mother Sky” is one of the greatest songs ever recorded, and rock and politics make boring bedfellows?
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
