S'lab

I'm not going to dispute the importance of Nirvana in connection with American popular music. That field of contention was always pretty fallow, yielding little musical analysis, mostly just hard, dry fruits: units shifted and concert grosses, network television appearances and tabloid rumors. (How would the band have fared in an Internet economy is something to think about.) What's important here is that Nirvana's breakthrough in 1991 made it easy for me to fully abandon even the token interest I'd maintained in "rock" music after I had really discovered jazz in the late 1980's. Sure, every now and then a buddy would pass along a Kyuss and a Jonathan Fire*Eater record, which I then would dump to cassette. I might read a passing reference to The Mountain Goats in a Mojo article. Or my brothers might be listening to Beck, The Cardigans, Gomez, Radiohead, The Chemical Brothers… while I was passing through their musical universes… say, on a December drive across East Texas, when CDs would come into play as soon as we left the FM signal for the brilliant fade-out of the blue yonder. I would counter Oasis with Coltrane's Meditations, beat back Stone Temple Pilots with Andrew Hill, and drown out Weezer with selections from the Black Saint catalog.

But there was one notable exception to my anti-pop bias in the mid-1990's, and that was Stereolab. I'm not certain I could give a rational explanation for why I let them in. Maybe it was the fact that their music was sultry yet cerebral. Maybe it was because I heard in them a subversive effort to re-introduce silly and rude noises back into pop songs. Maybe it was because they ripped-off artists I already admired -- and they have always stolen from the best: The Fall, Neu!, The Silver Apples, Krystof Komeda, Suicide, Sun Ra, Sonic Youth. Maybe it was because they made great records with great titles like "John Cage Bubblegum" and "Nihilist Assault Group". But maybe it was really because I first saw them in performance at Dallas' Trees in the autumn of 1996, and because that show is still one of the best rock shows I've ever attended. Should-a-been hits that were soothing and bouncy, candy-striped and "foamy" (as the title to one instrumental on the defining The Groop Played "Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music" EP has it) on record became psychedelic disco in concert. The band grooved -- all praise drummer Andy Ramsey -- and they jammed, too, but they substituted the abrasive, surprising sounds of collapsing MiniMoog circuits and guitar abuse, courtesy of founder Tim Gane, for the fey lyricism specialized in by the neo-noodle rockers who were their contemporaries.

Until about 12 hours ago, I had not seen Stereolab perform since 1999, when they were touring in plug of the ill-fated Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night. The show was edgy, and Trees seems a venue at odds with the music the band was trying to realize in a live setting. Things completely broke down during the encore -- the band's first single, "Super-Electric" -- as one drunken mosher began flailing his fists and boots around. Attempts at self-preservation by those standing around this individual were further complicated with the good old GA floor audience tendency to push back at those in front of you as they retreat from the violence developing at the front of the stage. A fight was inevitable; I was quickly resigned to getting sprayed with beer, and moved to put my arms around my date so she would not get carried off in whatever was about to erupt. I was not prepared for what actually occurred. The band stopped in mid-performance, lead vocalist and now young mother Laetitia Sadier furiously shouting at the crowd, "Stop it! Stop it right now!" The evening ended shamefully, with the person who was probably the most passionate Stereolab fan who sacrificed the 15 bucks for the show that night escorted in a fit of protest out of the club, but I will hand it Sadier for backing up the critical rhetoric in her lyrics with social action. In fact, Stereolab have yet to play Dallas since, preferring the posher and slightly more sedate surroundings of the Ridglea Theater in Fort Worth.

I'm not sure you could get more Gallic than Stereolab playing to the accompaniment of projected visuals -- time-lapsed footage of amusement park rides lit up and whirling away the night hours; what looked like a Levi's commercial from the 1970's, heavy on the rotoscoping; and, during "Cybele's Reverie", about the last 7 minutes of Maya Deren's Meshes Of The Afternoon -- in a converted movie house. But what was immediately striking about last night's concert was that it has taken no less than three young men manning keyboards, samplers, acoustic and electric guitars, and trumpet and French horn to take the place of the departed Mary Hansen. Counting Sadier, who now plays some sort of touch-pad analogue synth (a Buchla?) and Gane, who, as befits the Robert Fripp of indie rock, hides himself and his arsenal of effects pedals and black boxes at the back of the stage, there were now no less than 4 electronics manipulators on-stage. The set-list drew almost exclusively from the latest album, Margerine Eclipse -- a statement that I hope you will forgive, both for being obvious and initially a bit misleading. Because Margerine Eclipse is about as close as we are ever going to get to a Stereolab "greatest hits". In a very real sense, the new tunes are just new point-of-view adopted on the old tunes, and, even while these songs reference the group's "evolution" -- dicey word -- they sealed that history off within a certain distance, and not necessarily an ironic one. The new arrangements of older tracks such as "Lo Boob Oscillator" and "Diagonals" substitute oddly Vocoder-like brass figures for Mary Hansen's supporting melodies (no more "ba-ba-ba's"). It’s a little disconcerting and even sad, but, this band, which never really trotted out in old favorites, has even less incentive to do so now. Besides, a new track like "Margerine Rock" references the band's own sound circa Mars Audiac Quintet (think "Heavy Denim"). "Need To Be" sounds like an out-take from the Music For The Amorphous Body Center EP, while "Bop Scotch" is reminiscent of the kind of New Wave / Hip-Hop amalgamations that dominate Emperor Tomato Ketchup. "La Demeure" is another faintly experimental Cobra… track, and "Feel And Triple" evokes the techno cut-up style of Dots And Loops, still (IMHO) not Stereolab's masterpiece, but certainly, with its danceable, day-glo melancholia, their most emotionally satisfying record. With a band as self-conscious about producing albums that sound quite different from one another as Stereolab is, it makes sense to talk about them raiding their own past as the collective pop consciousness. What I feel the need to say, really, is that the whole concert was about Mary Hansen, about how interwoven she is into the band's life and work, and how her death, even though it was so accidental it does feel tragic, could never really change the music.

I find this fact remarkable because, album cover iconography and cybernetic song titles aside, Stereolab was never really about the past, or the future, or lapsed futurism, or smirking, glycerin tear-stained commentary on mid-20th century optimism about the utopia just over the smog-blotted horizon. Their classic music was really a construction of an alternate present, one teetering less on the precipice of millennial change, one in which the obscure and unpalatable music and ideas with which husband and wife Gane and Sadier are obsessed, instead of being marginalized, are rewarded with continuity, possess terrific currency and mass sway. Stereolab's own recognized influence over legions of post-rock musicians is thus wish-fulfillment in excelsis (or over-determined): it is a conquering of the airwaves ala Brian Wilson, it is critical canonization not unlike what the Velvet Underground received, and it is the ultimate validation of their tastes. Question: can one be completely impressionable and yet attain the status of "artist"? Answer: I keep hoping someone will tell me "yes" or "no". I still love Stereolab's 90's records, which feel so out of time -- they also got me through the first 2 drafts of my second novel -- but, if the 90's really were the second Me Decade, then those records are the quintessential soundtrack of those 10 years. Even when you have burrowed far, far inside, the chill of the outside may cling to you for a while still. However, the music Stereolab concentrated on last night, so redolent of the past, finally pointed to… hinted at… a future, and not a wholly imaginary one at that. Stereolab gave a spirited performance last night, sounding more confident than ever. They even appeared to be having fun.

Set List: Ridglea Theater, Fort Worth, TX (04/26/2004)

1. Margerine Melodie
2. Diagonals
3. Vonal Declosion
4. Double Rocker
5. "...Sudden Stars"
6. Mass Riff
7. Come And Play In The Milky Night
8. The Man With 100 Cells
9. Cosmic Country Noir
10. Lo Boob Oscilator
11. Need To Be
12. Bop Scotch
13. Margerine Rock
14. Cybele's Reverie

Encores

15. Motoroller Scalatron
16. Stomach Worm