Stereolab "Fab Four Suture" (Too Pure)
By Trey Perkins
Thursday. Mar 30, 12:28 AM
Treading the same ground, but with a different pair of shoes.

Fab Four Suture reminds me of Talking Heads’ movie Stop Making Sense. At that point in time, the Heads were well into their career, and their legion of fans waited with bated breath to find out where they would go next. It’s also important to consider the massive rupture between the earlier, art-rock punk material they played and the Afro-beat/disco-funk hybrid one finds on albums like Remain in Light and Fear of Music. However, the comparison works if and only if we consider David Byrne’s self interviews. At one point, Byrne asks himself in a very comical fashion whether or not the band will tour or produce any more albums. Byrne, in his typical nerdy, dilated pupil fashion, replies “when we have something new to say to an audience, we’ll tour again.” Despite the humor found in his self-interviews, it’s a worthy question that any band or musician should ask themselves when embarking on a new album and a new tour. It’s the equivalent of saying “well, our name is out there, so we don’t need to flood the market with continuous releases, or else people will get tired of us, and we’ve already DONE THAT. So where to next?”

Like the Heads then, Stereolab are well into their career. We’ve now got 10 Stereolab albums under our collective belts. In addition (as Ocillons From the Anti-Sun evinces), there are a myriad of EPs and singles that were previously unreleased in the United States. With the release of Fab Four Suture, Byrne’s axiomatic response to his own question reappears like a ghost in the machine. Can we say that Fab Four Suture stands out from Margerine Eclipse or any of their other releases? One thing that sets Stereolab apart from any other band out there right now, or any other band that ever existed, is the fact that they’ve successfully amalgamated so many disparate psychedelic sounds and lounge-esque genres, hip hop, and funk. One would never expect to hear someone merge the drone rock of The Velvet Underground with Os Mutantes, but Stereolab do it in almost every song. This achievement is admirable in its own right. But now that they’ve achieved it, you begin to wonder if that’s all they’ve got.

On one level, if you were to take Margerine Eclipse and Fab Four Suture and upload them onto your iPod, you may well get confused as to which track belongs on which album. If you’re not a hardcore fan of their music, you might even level the criticism that everything sounds the same. The keyboard still maintains that funky retro tonality. Yet I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again (perhaps I’m starting to sound monotonous): surface listening obscure the real details and nuggets that make this album another great experience. “Kyberneticka Babicka” parts 1& 2 book end each other, and serve as a great preface to the album: a droney vocal harmony with interesting changes. Now, it’s easy to become bored listening to this track. On the surface, it’s the same thing over and over again, but the more one listens to it, the more one hears. And the more one hears, the more one realizes that it’s not the same thing over and over again. There are many different parts that constitute “Kyberneticka Babicka.” The same could be said of any track on the album. So I guess where I’m going with this is that Stereolab’s arrangements get better and better every time. The simple fact that they can cull all sorts of strange instrumentation and noises and harmonize them into an organic song (which is also catchy, hummable, and interesting) makes them one of the most accomplished groups of musicians writing “pop-music” today. And if it sounds the same, so what? It’s an interesting sound. Furthermore, Fab Four Suture plays well as a whole. Most of the tracks are up tempo and feature changes that seem to come out of the blue, or when you least expect it.

If there is one unsung hero on the album, it’s Laetitia Saedler’s lyrics. For as many years as I’ve listened to Stereolab, I’ve always underrated Saedler’s lyrics. And now that I’ve realized how unique they are, I’d like to applaud her. I guess my initial attraction to Stereolab was their idiosyncratic sound and unique use of Moog synthesizers. Now that I expect that from the group, I’m searching for other interesting facets in their music. Saedler has often stated that her lyrics do have political meanings. She makes subtle reference to everything from Marxism to Totalitarian systems of government. On “Interlock,” she sings: “What good is all this knowledge when acquired in the face of Deep Nihilism?” Saedler encourages me to wonder if she’s going post-modern here with this this psuedo-Foucaultian verse. Yet you’d never expect it from Stereolab, especially when Saedler’s lyrics are juxtaposed with whimsical psychedelia. She’s delivering the sound of political resistance, class warfare, and liberation from oppression, but you’d never realize it because you’re caught up in fresh beats, organ swirls, clavinet hits, and Moog synthesizers. What an interesting method of inculcation!
www.stereolab.co.uk
www.toopure.com

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Trey Perkins

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