“We want to be able to be inspired, contemplate beauty, achieve excellence, and live life to the fullest. But we are governed by an exploitative economic system which is keeping this from happening”. So states Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier—in her native French—in “Manifest”, a track from We Are Divine, the debut album by her latest outfit Little Tornados. It’s far from her first extracurricular project; she previously played in Monade, and she’s also just released her third solo album, Something Shines. Regardless of how these various projects have been played, produced, packaged, and presented over the years, Sadier’s songs remain similar at their core, and that goes double for We Are Divine and Something Shines. Both albums are full of seemingly simple, subversively sophisticated avant-pop, with Sadier’s breathy, balmy voice as the high point. And as “Manifest” almost painfully demonstrates, both albums follow Stereolab’s tradition of unabashed leftist sloganeering.
In Stereolab, those slogans have always felt more abstract than literal, swirled as they are into pulsing Krautrock, bubbly yé-yé, retro-futurist exotica, and post-C86 jangle. But Sadier always sold her Marxist lullabies with a straight face, and if there’s one thing We Are Divine in particular conclusively proves, it’s that she was never even remotely joking. Little Tornados are a collective of instrumentalists formed around the core of filmmaker (and longtime Stereolab photographer) David Thayer, as well as Sadier; she’s on vocals and bass, while he handles vocals and guitar. In other words, it’s a similar group dynamic to the one Stereolab uses—only with Thayer assuming the role of Tim Gane. We Are Divine tracks like “In the Garden”, “How Many,” and “Space Liner”, laden with jazzy chords and playful ambience, could pass for decent, latter-day Stereolab outtakes, only looser and less densely layered. But it’s the lyrics of “Manifest” that hew closest to Stereolab’s alchemy of politics and pop, only it gets the balance wrong; over bouquets of vintage synths, Sadier’s pamphleteer-level pleas for freedom, equality, and brotherhood come off as canned, regardless of how exquisitely phrased they are in French.
We Are Divine, however, is not simply a cloned version of Stereolab; Thayer weighs in often with his distinct, low-key, mystic-bohemian ramble, and it brings a winning prog vibe to “Unicorn”; “Ben’s Boat” is a twangy, twinkling instrumental that borders on kosmische-country. The album’s definitive moment, “Have a Balloon”, is dashed and dotted with Sadier’s signature ba-ba-bas and da-da-das, with the occasional jazz-fusion fanfare on horns. The song is gorgeous, but it also gently mocks: like day-glo highlighting in a used Guy Debord textbook, the title and melody work together to magnify the Society-of-the-Spectacle message Sadier has been whispering into our ears all along.
Balloons aplenty can be found on Something Shines, too. Sadier’s third solo album smoothly continues her arc as an artist over the past three decades; like 2012’s Silencio and 2010’s The Trip before it, Something Shines is a satellite orbiting the Stereolab home world. “Quantum Soup” remixes the same elements she’s been surrounded with for three decades: sonar synths, chanson delight, Françoise Hardy-through-a-CB vocals. But here she impishly dissolves the glue that holds them together, until the song fades into a wash of spacious chaos. It’s the inverse of a noise breakdown, and when it all comes back together at the end, it feels less like a reinvention than a reaffirmation. During Stereolab’s prime in the 1990s, Sadier was part of one of the most exciting ensembles in music, genre notwithstanding. She doesn’t fight that overshadowing fact, but she doesn't let it slip by unchallenged, either.
Something Shines abounds with warm, swaying breezes that carry with them the smell of winter. “All of the roots we grew/ We will pull out,” she warns with a lash of her tongue in “Then, I Will Love You Again”; her voice has never sounded so near, let alone so large. The stiff, sci-fi samba of “The Scene of the Lie” and “Echo Port”, on the other hand, reveals the album’s biggest weakness, and that of Sadier’s solo work as a whole: there’s no avoiding that it comes off like Stereolab with too many of its pieces missing. The chords don’t stick, the melody doesn’t hook, and the delicate, intimate strength of tracks like “Butter Side Up” wind up lost in the shuffle. The slogans pop up again, naturally; couplets like “Meanwhile the ultra-rich in all impunity/ Rots our society” are harrowingly enunciated on the eerie, semi-acoustic “Oscuridad"—but in terms of depth, they don't rise above the quality of radical bookstore bumper stickers. As ardent and inviting as Something Shines and We Are Divine both are, Sadier seems content at this point to coo to the converted.
