When Stereolab announced plans to take an indefinite hiatus in April of last year, they also mentioned that a parting gift was in the works: Chemical Chords 2, a second record of material from the 2007 sessions that spawned the concise, horn-studded Chemical Chords. At the time, Tim Gane told Pitchfork it would "make an interesting kind of sibling or companion to [Chemical Chords]," and that they were hoping to get it out quickly "because it's too similar, it's from the same sort of sessions." Laetitia Sadier described it as having "31 songs, which are split into two halves. One is the day side, and one is the nighttime side."
Over the past year and a half, Not Music was pared back considerably: The final version features 13 songs, including two extended remixes of Chemical Chords songs by the Emperor Machine and Atlas Sound. This turns out to have been an effective approach. The careful song selection and sequencing of this mix is intended to play like a proper studio album, and mostly, it does, even with the 8-minute-plus remixes acting as centerpieces. And while obviously similar in sound to Chemical Chords, the record is suffused with as much joyous synth experimentation, astral effects and flourishes, and buzzy motorik rhythms as Stereolab's mid-career efforts.
Needless to say, if you're hoping for a career-defining endcap, this is not that record. The new, non-remix tracks on Not Music ignore much of Stereolab's omnivorous career-- there's no space-age bachelor pad music, no bossa nova flourishes, and no sign of the rawer avant-garde leanings that shaped their earliest records. Instead, the set continues in the taut, propulsive pop vein of their more recent releases.
Album opener "Everybody's Weird Except Me" is sweet yet dry, using the richness of Laetitia Sadier's nonchalant alto to cut the cuteness of the melody. The track plays off the dichotomies Stereolab have come to love-- old-fashioned pop tropes delivered by whirring, futuristic instruments, with cold detachment rubbing up against whimsical lushness and cerebral orchestrations played with charm. "Sun Demon" opens by deconstructing a garage-rock melody (there's a trace of the Castaways' "Liar, Liar" organ line in there) with splashes of videogame bleeps, then throws its back into an unrelenting rhythmic chug. And "Two Finger Symphony" explicitly answers the last record's "One Finger Symphony" with its slightly altered repetitive keyboard vamp.
Stereolab's last effort was among the most concise and tightly focused of the band's career, distilling their baroque, buzzing aesthetic into breathless, three-minute pop songs. Not Music mostly echoes that change, but also sprawls like vintage Stereolab when it needs to, as on the 10-plus-minute centerpiece "Silver Sands [Emperor Machine Mix]", which turns the xylophone melody of the Chemical Chords original into a sparse, mechanized krautrock throb.
The Stereolab story for the last five years has been, "Yep, they still sound like Stereolab." And if we're disappointed that the band's ever-experimental drive feels stifled by the brevity of this newer material, perhaps this hiatus is well-timed. While we learn to finally miss the quirky, stylish synth-pop that we've begun to take for granted, we'll have to content ourselves with Not Music as the band's final hurrah-- at least for now. I suspect it won't be long before we realize that the leftovers of a band like Stereolab are still better than main dishes offered up by many of their peers. And maybe by then, they'll be back to recording.
