Stereolab doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, they’re meticulous, drilling deeper into the retro-futurist pop universe that they began exploring 25 years ago. Even with a 15-year gulf between releases, their new record, Instant Holograms on Metal Film, is instantly recognizable as theirs from the first twinkling oscillator. The brainchild of guitarist Tim Gane and vocalist Laetitia Sadier, along with a rotating cast of collaborators, Stereolab is easily pegged for their blend of ’60s French yé-yé, krautrock chug, chamber pop softness, and Sadier’s cool-headed vocals, often obliquely touching on themes of socialism, Situationism, and surrealism. This, along with their notoriously eardrum-shattering live shows, has earned them a cavalcade of devoted fans as well as a few notable detractors (Robert Christgau once referred to Stereolab as “Marxist background music.”)
Instant Holograms on Metal Film, as with nearly all of their 10 previous albums, delivers on this in spades. What keeps their reverie from feeling stale, however, is Stereolab’s commitment to an emotional, artistic, and intellectual register beyond resignation. In a moment when most of the Left and even the middle have given up on any critical push for revolutionary change or even vague gestures towards equity, Stereolab’s progressive song structures and carefully layered textures are a reminder: these things come in cycles.
The archetypal Stereolab song structure sneaks up on you. With arpeggiating Moogs and buzzsaw textures, bells, and whistles that zoom by like fish in an aquarium, repetition lulls the listener in. This dedication to drilling away into one chord until they hit gold recalls early Detroit techno or even a ’70s disco single, looped again and again on the dancefloor. Then, all of a sudden, the song veers—a tempo shift, a pause, a melodic subversion. “Immortal Hands” emerges from a contemplative guitar-driven ditty into a prog rock breakdown with chunky piano chords, wah-wah pedals, flute croons, and trumpet honks. “Esemplastic Creeping Eruption” takes a heady, mathy riff and massages it until it’s a college-rock singalong, complete with a flanged drum coda that recalls the thunderous aerial interludes of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. “Vermona F Transister” is moodier, all tremolos and contemplative synths before bursting forth with a marching drum line.
Instant Holograms on Metal Film has drifted away from the grungy, Throwing Muses-style overdrive of Peng! and the Loveless-inflected rumblings of Mars Audiac Quintet, while still sounding distinctly Stereolab. The songs on Instant Holograms are not so much a departure from the band’s previous albums but a deepening, made all the richer by the way that it rewards multiple, sustained listenings. The songs will not shout for your attention. They will not cut through the chaos of the day. Older and more mature, only slightly touched by the tectonic cultural shifts of the last 15 years, they come to you in wafts and put you in a trance.
Then there’s Sadier’s vocals and lyrics. Her ever-present critique of modernity, with its all-consuming imperatives toward perpetual growth, is as sharp and incisive as her voice. She draws freely from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, critiques “the war economy, inviolable,” and the phallic piece of skyscrapers in the night sky. Meanwhile, “Melodie is a Wound” is even more explicit in its treatment of propaganda: “The goal is to manipulate / Heavy hands to intimidate / Snuff out the very idea of clarity / Strangle your longing for truth and trust.” Perhaps less expected is her exploration of spiritual transcendence, a connective tissue between all living things. On “Esemplastic Creeping Eruption,” she sings of shattering the ego and pursuing “wholeness” over perfection.
At its best, the record explores the failings of capitalism while simultaneously celebrating a divine empathy. On “If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt. 1,” Sadier first sings “J’appartiens à la terre / N’en suis propriètaire” (“I belong to the earth / I don’t own it”) over a slowly ascending synth line before delving into musings on “Permanent revolution of which implications / Are yet beyond our grasp.” The effect is not so much one of hope, which has its own disappointments and despairs built in, but of boundless curiosity and an insistence on identification with the world outside, no matter how hostile.
Just as they skewer the notion that, under capitalism, innovation is king and profits should always be increasing, with each subsequent record, Stereolab resists the idea that a band should always be reinventing. Rather than tackling new landscapes or new sonics, Gane and Sadier have opted to refine. They dive deeper inside the interior world of their music. Their subversions are subtle. Their revolutions are perpetual. The world is not remade, but for the stretch of a six-minute song, that’s okay. It is enough just to make it to another day.
