Experimental groop switch on again with their first new album in 15 years. By Victoria Segal. Illustration by Hawaii.

Stereolab ★★★★

Instant Holograms On Metal Film

DUOPHONIC UFH DISKS/WARP. CD/DL/LP

A FORMER Grange Hill star, a throng of spandex-clad dancers and a man gyrating in what seems to be a studded Roman centurion’s loincloth: Stereolab weren’t exactly playing to their high-minded home crowd the night they appeared on Channel 4’s notorious post-pub variety show The Word. Watch the footage 32 years later, and it’s hard to know what’s more ferocious – the full-pelt version of their 1993 track French Disko or the eye-rolling disdain singer Laetitia Sadier patently has for the whole scene. Yet the urgency transmitted through the cascading harmonies of Sadier and her bandmate Mary Hansen is undimmed, the message – “I say there are things still worth fighting for” – culminating in a single ringing call to arms: “La Resistance! La Resistance!”

Since their formation in 1990, Stereolab have always felt like a band in opposition – not the Wild One rebellion of traditional rock’n’roll, but a state of precise musical foment and pol-sci plotting. It’s very much in their blood. Guitarist and musical foreman Tim Gane spent most of the ’80s in proto-Manics firebrands McCarthy, while Sadier was born in Paris during the revolutionary tumult of May 1968, the perfect origin story for a woman who would one day cram an assessment of boom-bust capitalist systems into 1994 single Ping Pong (“It’s alright ’cos the historical pattern has shown/How the economical cycle tends to revolve/In a round of decades”).

Opening up new spaces has always felt like a vital part of the Stereolab mission, their Space Age Bachelor Pad not so much intended as a kitsch chick-magnet but a free-thinking research facility where they could experiment Tomato Ketchup – the group (now Gane, Sadier, drummer Andy Ramsay, bassist Xavi Muñoz Guimera and keyboardist Joe Watson) slowly gravitated towards the idea of making new music. It’s been recorded and engineered by Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas, a pleasing Chicago echo of their sterling Dots And Loops-era collaboration with Tortoise’s John McEntire.

BACK STORY: SWITCHED ON

● Although Instant Holograms On Metal Film is their first album of new recordings since 2010’s Not Music, Stereolab’s ongoing programme of Switched On compilations – initiated in 1992 – continued with 2021’s Electrically Possessed and 2022’s Pulse Of The Early Brain. Among the highlights of volumes 4 and 5 were a 2000s EP The First Of The Microbe Hunters, a 2004 live performance of Cybele’s Reverie at the Hollywood Bowl, a demo of 1993’s Ronco Symphony and a 2001 7-inch tour single called – stretching the boundaries of their usual style of title – Free Witch And No Bra Queen. endlessly with their Bacharach-and-Debord pop, the Xerox polemics of riot grrrl, the radical exotica of Tropicália, their foundational Krautrock texts. It’s the right-on, artisanal take on billionaires trying to get to the moon: by reconstructing and remodelling precious artistic resources, they could create their own imaginative compounds, forge their own rules of engagement, all the while pushing for real-world change. (Emerging at the same time as shoegazing, Stereolab had notably little time for its blurry escapism).

Instant Holograms On Metal Film, their first new album since the Seine-side sunshine pop of 2008’s Chemical Chords and its 2010 overflow companion piece Not Music, makes it clear those adventuring impulses have not tarnished with time. “I’m the creator of this reality,” sings Sadier over the baroque musicbox riffs of Vermona F Transistor, “not the joker who pretends a god to be.” Reconvening in 2019 to play live around the reissue of seven early albums – among them 1994’s Mars Audiac Quintet and 1996’s Emperor

“There is a real and immediate warmth to Instant Holograms… an unmistakable ripple of hope.”

The record begins with the appropriate start-up chime of Mystical Plosives, before setting out its downbeat stall with Aerial Troubles, an elegy for a world lost in malign static, struggling with its vertical hold. “The numbing is not/It is not working any more,” sings Sadier, but the track quickly escalates into compact, crunched-down energy burst, a refusal to lie down. If modernity is in the “palliative” stage, it argues, then it’s time to become midwives to a new way of living.

Stereolab have often been accused of being brainin-a-jar cerebral, all up there for thinking despite the wow and flutter of their grooves and beats, or the emotional side shown on ode to parenthood People Do It All The Time (from 1999’s Cobra And Phases

Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night). There is a real and immediate warmth to Instant Holograms On Metal

Film, however, an unmistakable ripple of hope. The attention to detail demands you live in its present, whether that’s the exhilarating instrumental Electrified Teenybop!, or the dragged-out drum’n’bass coda of Esemplastic Creeping Eruption (not, despite the title, a Carcass cover).

There are still stentorian directives and fierce invective, especially on the wonky clockwork pop of Colour Television. An IBM Daisy Bell with AI enhancements, it attacks “the deluding promise of a middle class for all,” as the swaying beat moves towards lemming-like oblivion. Likewise, Melodie Is A Wound works itself up into a malfunctioning synthesizer blow-out, but Immortal Hands – featuring cornet from Ben LaMar Gay – strives to swap “ego skyscraper erect and collapsible/Nihilistic and vulgar” for love and nature.

This is a record that more frequently speaks and embodies the language of connection, of entwining and union, the clash between hard-edged politics and the beautiful fractals of their music less stringently juxtaposed than in earlier work. La Coeur Et La Force, beginning with a Rock Bottom shiver, waves its antenna into the air and sees what it can receive back, while the Tortoise-like syncopations of Transmuted Matter explore what it means to be “fully human/Fully divine” before sliding off into cosmic raptures. “It’s because I am you/It’s because you are me,” declares Sadier on the splashy yé-yé of If You Remember I Forgot How To Dream Part 1, while Part 2 refers to the need to explore the “rhizomic maze”, a term that comes from both botany and philosophy. It suggests networks and connections, its tangles and bulges of guitar and drum machine mimicking something growing in head-feeding new directions, a crop of sustaining roots or maybe a vast mycelial web.

The mainstream might have danced closer to them over the years – nobody needed to know their track The Flower Called Nowhere was Pharrell Williams’ choice of sex soundtrack – but Stereolab have never quite been absorbed. The music they make is still not easy – it’s a good bet that Instant Holograms On Metal Film will be the only record this year to feature the word “desuetude”. Yet they still have a rare ability to rearrange the world around them, pulling away the mundane scenery of everyday life, throwing new possibilities centre-stage, insisting there are still things worth fighting for.

Anderson East

★★★★

Worthy

ROUNDER. CD/DL/LP

Down to earth country soul return for Nashville-based singer.

It’s taken Anderson East nearly four years to follow up 2021’s Maybe We Never Die as he wrestled with his personal expectations as a musician. Recording Maybe We Never Die proved a soulless solo experience for the Alabaman singer/writer/producer during Covid isolation, but here he gathered his band in co-producer David Cobb’s studio and just played. What emerged is an album that at its best catches lightning in a bottle, a country soul flip-side to the more urban neo-soul of Monophonics’ Kelly Finnigan or, when he pushes his limits ragged, Nathaniel Rateliff. The album glides in on the late-night Sam Cooke vibe I’d Do Anything, picks up some hard-nosed ’60s Chicago grit on the title track, and Foy Vance and Bonnie Bishop add gospel backing vocals to Never Meant To Hurt You.

Slick, sweet and sweaty, Worthy is a spectacular return.

Andy Fyfe

caroline

★★★★

caroline 2

ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP

South London collective get more direct on second LP.

caroline’s 2022 debut drew soft power from the tension between the slow-drip of their post-rock chamber music and the intemperate feelings teeming within it. On caroline 2, however, those emotions are in the foreground; they build and explode, yielding deconstructed pocket symphonies that are grand and intimately affecting. They remain playfully experimental: opener Total Euphoria’s shifting tempos, whispered vocals and keening melodies build to a crescendo so loud it obliterates the tape; there’s the occasional foray into Auto-Tune; the archly-titled Coldplay Cover begins as a voice-note and grows into something lovely and anthemic. But there’s a newfound earnestness and openness to caroline’s songcraft, owing more this time to heart-on-sleeve late-’90s US emo like American Football. They now plot direct paths to the catharsis that was delayed and drawn-out in their earlier work; their beautiful, rousing music is more accessible and lucid as a result.