The Pipettes as a group were never bound to last—a decade on, it doesn’t sound so appealing to combine the girl-group fandom of indie rock with the schtick of Meghan Trainor and the singer-retention of the Sugababes. The Pipettes as a group of artists, though, have been remarkably prolific. Two years ago, Gwenno Saunders released the year’s highest-concept album, the Welsh-language, sci-fi-enamored Y Dydd Olaf. Bandmate Rose Elinor Dougall, meanwhile has quietly released several albums and EPs’ worth of lovelorn pop music. The comparison is inevitable—both artists work in more or less the same vein of synthpop—but where Gwenno prefers futurism, Dougall prefers romanticism. On tracks like “Fallen Over” and “Hanging Around,” she sheds the self-consciousness and polka-dotted prurience of her old group for a disarmingly earnest swoon.
Stellular, produced with Oli Bayston of Boxed In (who also sings on and co-wrote “Dive”) is not a departure from her past solo work—if you’ve heard any of the EPs, you know what to expect, and even if you haven’t, you can venture a guess. Dougall is a Pipettes alum; pastiche is expected. Specifically, most of Stellular wouldn’t exist without the past several decades of post-punk (in particular, Blondie), and the rest of it wouldn’t exist without Trish Keenan and Sarah Cracknell. The lilting “Take Yourself With You” recalls ’70s folk, spacey Stereolab, and some of ABBA’s pastoral, statelier tracks. As influences, they’re ideal—they don’t lend themselves to kitsch so much as sturdy, comfortable arrangements that Dougall inhabits with love and familiarity.
Take the title track: it begins bramble-spiky, but Dougall makes it entrancing. She winds through verbosities like “Hopes and despairs in parallel live wildly side by side” effortlessly, almost distracted. It’s a love song, but a hesitant one, caught between prickly guitars and moony sentiments, warning itself off in the bridge: “You’re giving yourself away again.” The title, as precisely chosen as the rest, compares her would-be partner to a small star; full-on cosmic crushing is just not something the narrator allows herself. She does allow herself the more earthy kind on “Closer”: closing time in some arbitrary bar, gazing at someone who’d rather blather on about something so much less important than moving their hand that last crucial centimeter. Dougall’s a wry songwriter when she wants to be, and she delivers these details to match, but the way her coy chorus and frosty “I don't care about your band—it’s 3:45 a.m.” melt within seconds reveals her hopes, and the speeding-heartbeat guitar lick, her blissful impatience. The other blatant new wave cut, “All at Once,” pulls the same sleight-of-heart. There’s as much “Rapture” in it as actual rapture; the funk and whispers and “tonight”s affect cool and do it quite well, but the lyrics—“Give me apathy...sentence me to heaven”—merely aspires toward it, from a longing place.
Indeed, what elevates Stellular from just another decade’s nostalgia exercise is that longing. “Answer Me,” while the weakest track here—Dougall’s posh voice doesn't navigate soft-rock or R&B ballads well—redeems itself in its final minute, a plush pile of backing vocals; “Space to Be” is nothing but redemption. It’s a sequel to “Stellular”—the chorus melody is tucked into the synths—set in the same city with the same loneliness, but none of the hesitation. The chorus might lend itself to a girl-group arrangement, and certainly the sentiment would: “I want a love to lift me up high, to wreak havoc on this heart of mine, tear me limb from limb until I find some kind of space to be.” But where the Pipettes would give it irony or sex somewhere, and just about every other girl-group revivalist would lean into the darkness and violence, Dougall leaves it at full-throated emotion.
