This is just a repost of something found on Pitchfork, but it’s a reason to be cheerful, anyway. Stereolab were one of the most unusual and often impenetrable bands of the mid-nineties- if you put some of their music on for a friend, you’d either get a reaction of total bafflement or utter love. motoric Krautrock beats, weird analogue keyboards making the kind of thing robots would do if you told them to make lounge music (as opposed to Daft Punk, which is what robots would do if you told them to make disco music), and serene gallic-toned harmonies with lyrics which contained such gems as ‘originally the institutions were set up to serve society, now society serves the institutions.’ On the quiet, they were like the Manics, chucking provocative Marxist rhetoric into (sort of) pop music, and rendering it indecipherable as they did so. They were awesome.
They’ve been ploughing their own particular furrow for what seems like forever now, and announced recently that enough was enough, at least for the time being (although frontwoman Letitia Sadler will be putting out more solo stuff soon).
Luckily, however, there is still some new music to look forward to. with a new album called ‘Not Music’ coming out on Drag City records on the 16th of November.
Fantastic. I’m imagining it’ll be as charming, quirky and impenetrable as the band I’ve come to know and love over the years. I also hope it’s not the end for them- it’s harder and harder for bands to sustain themselves, and some bands really shouldn’t. Stereolab have managed to settle into that comfortable territory between ‘groundbreaking/unique’ and ‘instantly themselves no matter what record of theirs you put on’ that, say, Sonic Youth have also managed. It’s hard to know when diminishing returns set in, and I’m hoping that maybe this will just be a fallow period which allows them to return refreshed and invigorated.
In the mean time, here’s a reminder of exactly what got us interested in them in the first place: