On Stereolab's 1994 single "Ping Pong", 60s French lounge music and Farfisa organ lent a retro patina to singer/lyricist Laetitia Sadier's Marxist commentary on capitalist boom/bust cycles, which she rendered with a thick layer of irony. "You see the recovery always comes 'round again/ There's nothing to worry for things will look after themselves," cooed the woman born in Paris in May 1968, playing tongue-in-cheek about capitalism's invisible hand. Six years later, when pets.com was put down by the dot-com bubble's burst, things looked bad. They got even worse eight years after that, when Wall Street's credit-default swaps turned American suburbs into ghettos. Nero fiddles, Rome burns, and all most are left to do is murmur "dum dum dum dee dum dum dee-da-dee-da-dee," like Sadier at the end of "Ping Pong", waiting for the next volley to come over the net.
Marx's theory was proven right by our most recent financial crisis, so it's not too much of a shock that Sadier's second solo album for Drag City, Silencio, would mark a return to pop punditry after the more personal and straightforward pop of 2010's overlooked LP The Trip. Don't expect the Occupy campers to wheel out the Moogs just yet, though: The impeccable cool of Sadier's approach freezes out political engagement in lieu of a brand of fashionable leftism to match the sofa. Robert Christgau once described Stereolab as "Marxist background music," and Sadier's lyrics have always treated politics as another set of cultural symbols to work into fanciful new shapes.
Particularly in a year when the internet blew up at burgeoning lefty Megan Draper chirping "Zou Bisou Bisou" to Don during the "Mad Men" season premiere, Silencio feels as timelessly hip as a pair of Wayfarers or an Eames chair. The album matches Sadier's husky alto with lush synths, pretty melodies, and the occasional presence of a café-infused Latin-style acoustic strum that suggests a Wes Anderson-directed make-out scene. As always, Sadier works best when asking generic Big Questions that tip over into the surreal or absurd: picking the brain of her friend Sue the mathematician (in "Find Me the Pulse of the Universe") or eating jambon crudité and wondering about the gap between perception and reality (in "Moi Sans Zach"), both presented with the breeziness of Jobim or early Gainsbourg. The chicken-scratch mod-funk of "Fragment pour le future de l'homme" is a surprise highlight, nodding back toward Stereolab's pureéd guitars while lyrics promise a brighter future for a generation caught spinning its Vespa wheels.
That doesn't make those moments when the political theories overpower the songs themselves any easier to overlook, though. This wasn't a problem with the likes of Stereolab's "Ping Pong" or "The Noise of Carpet", both of which offered the choice of tuning out the message for the catchy tunes, or intellectually merging and deconstructing the two components instead of reading Derrida for the next day's critical theory seminar. But on Silencio, a song like "There Is a Price for Freedom (And it Isn't Security)" is a mouthful, the sort of slogan you'd expect to see on a leaflet foisted upon you on a college campus. The production strives for the sort of fauxchestral grandeur that Super Furry Animals perfected on their own politically themed concept albums Rings Around the World and Phantom Power, but can't push past a groaner like "Follower of conformity/ Happy to identify with a reflection in merchandise." I'll spare you detailed quotes from "Ausculatation to the Nation", but just know that while the composition is fine enough, the lyrics are transcribed word for word from a caller's rant to a French political talk show. With this as a contrast point, it's best that the album ends with a Sadier spoken-word monologue, recorded in an old French church, during which she expounds on the resonant qualities of silence before letting the recorder pick up the tone of the cavernous, otherwise empty room.
