STEREOLAB – INSTANT HOLOGRAMS ON METAL FILM: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- Jun 9
- 3 min read
STEREOLAB
Instant Holograms On Metal Film (Duophonic/Warp)
JUST BECAUSE IT DOESN’T make sense, doesn’t mean it won’t make sense.
If someone had announced 40 years ago they would form a band mixing Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66’s light instrumental touch with squelchy Makers Of The Dead Travel Fast-like electronica, Martin Denny’s exotica with arty kids in the backroom doing heads-down guitar, easy rhythms and loose dance with the chilled beats of Dusseldorf, the droll pop women of ye-ye with the denim studio men of ‘70s LA, and that they would do it in French and English (both language and philosophy), the obvious, sensible, immediate question would have been ‘are you out of your cotton-picking minds?’
Stereolab were not out of their minds but then they had a different mind at play, one that didn’t just do these unlikely combinations but brought a melodic sensibility and emotional strain that were not ironic but deeply felt. And then added an unmistakeable political and intellectual subtext. As you do.
After a break of 15 years, and more than 20 years since the death of co-vocalist Mary Hansen, Stereolab – built around Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier, and expanding and contracting as needed – have an album that is everything all at once of Stereolab. And in case that isn’t clear, take a look at some of the song titles: Electrified Teenybop!, Mystical Plosives, Esemplastic Creeping Eruption, and If You Remember I Forgot How To Dream (parts 1 and 2).
You can see the wit, self-referencing, intellect and willingness to provoke still. Just as you can once again, in Immortal Hands, walk in the grey suit and severe fringe of the dry workers camp youth group leader (its deadpan delivery the flat surface for the burbling electronics and fluid bass) who suddenly breaks out in bourgeois decadence for a brassy frolic midway through the song. Or indeed, find that same youth group leader wistful for the days before five year plans in the light synths and rolling keyboard bass of Colour Television.
Rather than underpinnings of an outwardly dour group leader, the spiralling synth repetitions of Electrified Teenybop! run on a kind of ‘70s space drama energy (for some reason I kept thinking of Logan’s Run if scored by Jean-Michel Jarre), where youth is untapped, for now. Vermona F Transistor beckons young and old to the dancefloor, or the autobahn, like a low-slung sports car waiting by the side of the road, door opened and keys in the ignition. And everyone is free to move in Melodie Is A Wound, which is groovy-man-groovy, like someone frugging in a turtleneck, but elegantly – all encased inside a melody that is a lovely salve rather than wound.
Sadier is joined on vocals occasionally on this record by Marie Merlet, whose voice doesn’t blend quite as eerily as Hansen’s had (that original combination sometimes sounded not like one voice but one experience seen from different angles) but does play contrast and contour, and, for something pretty new, she gets Joe Watson and Xavi Munoz opposite her at times. Yes, male voices. The male/female interactions work like late ‘60s vocals groups in Le Coeur Et La Force, which is almost hymnal and yet a little smoky, like an early Claude Chabrol film, and Esemplastic Creeping Eruption leans into that Brasil ’66 byplay, at least until the guitar hardens up in a way Mendes would never have countenanced.
I’ve never accepted the argument that Stereolab, and Sadier in particular, remained too distant, too insouciant for full connection. What looked like cool distance to some always felt a thin layer of skin away from feelings a little too heated for me, a place where the intellect and the emotion fed each other. And that hasn’t changed here, from the prods to reconsider our self-worth in the lyrics, to the temptations to forget ourselves in the flow of bodies. Cool but not chilly. Familiar.
So, no, Instant Holograms On Metal Film is not new Stereolab, not revelatory Stereolab, but it is good Stereolab.
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