Fluxblog Weekly #231: Stereolab, Stereolab, Stereolab, Stereolab, Stereolab (and Wilco)
I took a break from writing about new material to spend a week writing about some of my favorite Stereolab songs, one from each of the recent expanded reissues from their classic era between 1993 and 1999.
Elsewhere, I wrote about Wilco’s new album Ode to Joy for NPR – in a broader sense, it’s a piece about how prolific and consistently good career artists end up having to compete with their own best work, and in this case, make a deliberately small record to get away from the more epic qualities of their more famous songs.
September 29th, 2019
Untie The Tangles
Stereolab “Metronomic Underground”
When Stereolab perform “Metronomic Underground” now, Laetitia Sadier introduces it as music for “meditation.” I’d never thought of the song in that way before, but when I consider how I’ve engaged with it through the past few decades, I somehow instinctively understood this intention. It’s a song I’ve always gravitated to when I need to find a center, or a feeling of peace and harmony in a hectic world. I’ve always heard the music as being specifically urban, like a musical depiction of a city observed from a distance, people and cars and trains moving to a hidden groove.
This is one of my favorite pieces of music. If I had to make a list of my top songs through my life, it’d probably be top 10. I can never understate how much I love this song, and its bass groove in particular. The arrangement feels geometric to me, like shapes moving and aligning around that bass in a steady lateral progression. There is a profound sense of balance and precision to the music, but it’s performed with a very human energy. Live versions of the song go faster, and include extended noisy sequences. The version the groop performs in 2019 does both of these things, but also shifts the tempo around – it slows near the end, but it’s a bit of a fake-out as it picks back up before the conclusion. It’s like the music is an immaculately designed map, and the band takes different paths through it every time.
The lyrics for “Metronomic Underground” are essentially evergreen in relationship to a culture with some form of media, but feel particularly prescient about the time we live in now. “Who knows does not speak, who speaks does not know” sums up the state of political media. “Rounding the sharpness, untie the tangles,” a good description of the urge to simplify the complexity of art and human experience in the interest of harsh moral judgment or a refusal to engage with contradiction. “To be infinite, to be vacuous,” a pithy summary of social media. This is all very cynical, but it doesn’t undermine the meditative quality of the music. The critique is abstracted and removed from context in a way that suggests an eternal truth. It’s all something to be understood, a state of human nature. You have to find your peace with it.
Buy it from Amazon.
September 30th, 2019
To Keep Our Lives Going
Stereolab “Brakhage”
There are a lot of things happening in “Brakhage” but the center of the song is just two chords, strummed in a steady and relaxing pattern through all the rhythmic and melodic changes. As with “Metronomic Underground,” there’s a suggestion of objects moving in an unconscious synchronicity through a physical space. I closely associate the sound of this with commuter trains and hub spaces, moving walkways and airports. The tone isn’t tense or agitated, it’s more a sense of calm and order. It’s turning your mind off and going on autopilot as you navigate your way from point A to point B.
You follow the pulse of Tim Gane’s guitar until there’s finally a deviation of the pattern in a break sequence a little over 4 minutes in, and you get a different two chord pattern for a few seconds before clicking back into the original sequence. There is a feeling of low-key relief in that switch-up, like you’ve just arrived at a destination only to get back to moving through corridors on your way to someplace else.
Laetitia Sadier’s lyrics reinforce the commuter interpretation by repeating a mantra – “we need so damn many things to keep our stupid lives going” – that spells out the motivation of keeping oneself in this loop of passive behavior. The tone isn’t angry or dismissive, just self-aware and clued in to the absurdity of it all. It’s the awareness of how fragile needs make us, and how much we risk by stepping outside of this system.
Buy it from Amazon.
October 1st, 2019
Born With The World
Stereolab “Wow and Flutter”
There is an odd sort of optimism in Laetitia Sadier’s lyrics, in that she consistently acknowledges the worst of the world but also the impermanence of any condition. This is most clearly stated in the mantra of “Crest” from Transient Random Noise-Bursts with Announcements: “If there’s been a way to build it, there’ll be a way to destroy it, things are not all that out of control.” “Wow and Flutter,” a song from the subsequent album Mars Audiac Quintet, expands on this notion and goes beyond aphorism into more specific context. She roots it in personal experience of youth – “I didn’t question, I didn’t know,” “I thought IBM was born with the world, the US flag would float forever” – before embracing hope in the understanding that all things will end.
The faith at the core of “Wow and Flutter” is in that what comes after a grim present is a brighter future, or at least that it’s possible to correct mistakes rather than let them metastasize further. Sadier’s tone is cold and sober, her hopes are not particularly high but there’s a feeling in the music of swelling hope and pride. “Anthemic” isn’t a mode Stereolab worked in often, but it sorta applies to this one, and the way its chorus rises emphatically over a chugging rhythm. The song isn’t promising anything but entropy, but the music is asking you to do your part to help shift the arc of time and history towards something more bearable.
Buy it from Amazon.
October 2nd, 2019
Fragile Defense Of Words
Stereolab “Come and Play in the Milky Night”
“Come and Play in the Milky Night” has a swing to it that sets it apart from Stereolab’s tendency towards more rigid grooves. The song feels light and effervescent, with Tim Gane’s gentle chords playing off Andy Ramsay’s cymbals in a way that evokes light reflecting off water on a summer night. The bass, keyboard, and vocal melodies are just as lovely, and it all comes together as one of the group’s most relaxed and beautiful recordings. It’s strange that this song is something of an outlier in their discography – the feel of it seems very natural for them, or at least for Ramsay. As the catalog progressed, Gane’s compositional style moved mostly towards tighter constructions, to the point that the later works often felt more like listening to structures than songs.
Laetitia Sadier sings at the top of her register here, and given the way her words are clipped by the melody, I didn’t realize for a long time that she was singing in English rather than French. The words just didn’t register at all, and the vocal here feels more atmospheric than central to the composition. The lyrics support the tone of the track, offering up images of stars and the night sky while suggesting a move away from rational thought. It’s like she’s just telling you – “it’s alright, let it all go for now and enjoy this moment.”
Buy it from Amazon.
October 3rd, 2019
Insane Realities To Come
Stereolab “Jenny Ondioline” (7″ Version, Alternate Mix)
Stereolab is now best known for an immaculate, groovy, keyboard-heavy sound, but their breakthrough record Transient Random Noise-Bursts with Announcements only barely hints at that aesthetic in a couple tracks and places all emphasis on Tim Gane’s overdriven guitar riffs, buzzing synths, and Krautrock-derived rhythms. It’s a highly distinctive aesthetic – a maturation of where they started on Peng! and the Switched On singles, but far less lounge-y and refined than where they’d end up only a year later on Mars Audiac Quintet. But whereas the former record is a transitional work on the way to Gane and Laetitia Sadier truly finding their stylistic lane on Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Transient is a fully formed masterpiece. They could have kept iterating on this vibe, but probably understood it was unlikely to top what they had accomplished with it.
The version of “Jenny Ondioline” that appears on Transient is a side-long 18 minute suite which also includes what is separately known as “Exploding Head Movie” on the Refried Ectoplasm compilation. That sequence is essentially a reworked cover of Neu!’s “Hallogallo,” the very definition of what is called the “motorik” aesthetic. The primary part of the song, which is about the first 7 minutes on record but is edited down to under 4 minutes for the single version, is pretty much the pinnacle of the first phase of Stereolab’s career. All of Gane and Sadier’s musical and lyrical concepts culminate in this piece, and in the process, they level up as pure songwriters.
“Jenny Ondioline” is rough and loud but elegantly composed, and bracketed by two power-strummed guitar sequences that work like sonic columns. The main rhythm is mechanical and precise, but has a brightness to it as well, like sparkling light on chrome. The section just before the chorus, in which the music drops back and a “oooooooh” vocal is foregrounded, builds drama but also offers a more sensual sort of beauty. The chorus is probably the best proper chorus of their career – bold, emphatic, and defiant with punk spirit even if the tone is more reasonable and pragmatic. Sadier is bitter but idealistic here, singing about the dire state of encroaching fascism and the disappointments of socialism in action, but with a genuine hope that conditions can be improved. This is a thematic thread that carries on through her work for many years, but it’s rarely stated as clearly and as powerfully as it is here.
Buy it from Amazon.