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Stereolab: Instant Holograms on Metal Film review – after 15 years, the retro-futurists make a radiant return
Motorik grooves, Marxist critique and vintage synths – in their first album since 2010, Lætitia Sadier et al pick up where they left off yet sound more timely than ever
The first words you hear Lætita Sadier and backing vocalist Marie Merlet sing – their voices winding around each other in a sweet-but-sad melody, over the tight, mid-tempo rhythm of Aerial Troubles – are “the numbing is not working any more / An unfillable hole, an insatiable state of consumption (systemic) / assigned trajectory (extortion).” Immortal Hands shifts from jazzy sunshine pop to drum-machine-driven funk; a hint of drum’n’bass lurks around the agitated rhythm of Transmuted Matter; the bouncy keyboard riff of Esemplastic Creeping Eruption seems to have been transplanted into the song from a lost 70s kids’ show. Amid the album’s references to the death of modernity and Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, you could read the lyrics of Esemplastic Creeping Eruption, with their talk of “reconciliations”, leaving “the realm of oppositions” and the “bountiful tap” of creativity as being about nothing more complicated than reforming the band.
Or read this on The Guardian