Metro, May 10
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Stereolab are often described as Marxist eccentrics juxtaposing Krautrock with slinky exotica, but their recent performance at Metro proved that they’re both a whole lot more and a bit less. Though they experimented more than they have in any of their other recent appearances (including some terrific gigs last summer while they were in town recording their new Emperor Tomato Ketchup), Gane remained a human metronome–even on the rhythmically complex “Percolator,” which used an off-kilter time signature that wouldn’t be out of place on a Dave Brubeck record. Drummer Andy Ramsay and new bassist Richard Harrison built a foundation through swirling, trance-inducing repetition. The guitar mantras made famous by the Velvet Underground, and like the one in Stereolab’s “Lo Boob Oscillator,” were inventively appropriated and played off the seemingly incongruous ingredients that comprised the music’s rich melodic scheme. Even through the song’s droning coda–filled with rippling guitar textures and shimmery, undulating Farfisa and synthesizers–that same sturdy pulse endured.
But what makes Stereolab’s music so extraordinary is the way they weave together so many disparate elements. For them the groove is a skeleton over which they craft their immaculate melodic shapes. Though their music melds together countless genres of the past, the arrangements are free of irony. (The closest Stereolab got to it at Metro was pairing high-tech laser machines with tacky reflective plastic balls haphazardly hung in front of a black backdrop.) The band’s infatuation with easy-listening pioneers of the 50s like Esquivel and Martin Denny is not ironic. Gane has repeatedly asserted his admiration for their inventive arrangements and artful appropriations of bizarre, theoretically nonmusical sounds. Reflecting this aesthetic, the band’s new album incorporates gurgling, archaic synthesizer sounds into a lush sonic mosaic of contrapuntal harmonies. Past member and frequent collaborator Sean O’Hagan–now leading the band High Llamas–adds to the mix his sumptuous string arrangements.
