If I remember correctly, Stereolab supported Jarvis Cocker and Pulp during some leg or other of the band’s 1995 ‘Different Class’ tour. Sadly, I don’t remember much about the experience as I was numb with excitement and cruelly indifferent (class) to everything else going on that evening. Which is a shame really, as Stereolab have proved to be a more enduring proposition altogether. I would say slow-burner, but this fails to account global warming, which is only fractionally less flammable.
Like anything that matures positively with age, Stereolab get more sophisticated, more incongruent and more uncompromising the older they get. If tracks like ‘Two Finger Symphony’ and ‘Neon Beanbag’ are anything to go by, the band might have dispensed with the incorrigible sloganeering and Marxist bluster of their youth, but they’re no less unpredictable, whipping up the kind of claustrophobia more commonly associated with pot holing experiences and slipping into a much smaller person’s underwear. ‘Supaj Jaianto’ and ‘Leleklato Sugar’ are like Belle & Sebastian with jetpacks, the lushest of lounge-core melodies, the jauntiest of brass and the kookiest of vocal fashions, like Astrud Gilberto decked out in a pair of silver hotpants and Barbarella camp. Surreal is still the best word for it, the kind of music most favoured by Philosophy students and members of the Guildhall, School of Music and Drama.
If selling up and buying a house in Brittany comes across as a bit extreme, or you’re making no headway with that Jean Paul Sartre you loaned from the library, you could do far worse than a picking up a copy of ‘Not Music’. If you don’t like it, you’ll at least have a rough idea of how Chumbawamba might have sounded had they completed their Foundation degrees.
The second of the band’s ‘Bordeaux’ releases ( 2008’s ‘Chemical Chords’ being the first), ‘Not Music’ is released on Novembre 16th through Duophonic Records.