Stereolab are playful but incisive on Instant Holograms on Metal Film

Instant Holograms on Metal Film fits so seamlessly into their near-faultless canon that you can’t help but wonder why critics didn’t always appreciate them the first time around.

During the band’s heyday, music critics seemed to prefer soliloquising about Stereolab to actually listening to them. Whether it was snarky take-downs of their socialist call-to-arms lyrics, feigned exhaustion at their aesthetic idiosyncrasies, or out-and-out dismay at their dedication to slowly and delicately refining what had become a relatively flawless formula, the discourse surrounding Stereolab seemed to outgrow and overshadow their excellent and at times genuinely transcendent work.

At some point between the release of 1997’s Dots and Loops and 1999’s Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, Stereolab became a band to lampoon, to sneer at, and to declare either irredeemably uncool, too cool for their own good, or both at once. It’s hard to shake the possibility that some of that criticism came from the simple crime of having the temerity to name an album Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night in the first place, so petty did the supposed gripes seem. This was, after all, the era of such austere nomenclature as Blur’s 13 and R.E.M.’s Up, and David Bowie’s Hours. 90s rock’n’roll excess was more often laid bare between the sheets of tabloid papers than within the records themselves.

In retrospect, the most bizarre thing about this criticism is that Stereolab are, undeniably, cool. They are cool not in a way which is dictated by fads or fashions, but in the same way that cool jazz is cool: they are relaxed to the point of cocksureness and unquestionably in control. The new album is a testament to this timeless and unwavering sense of calm and collectedness. The thrillingly familiar arpeggiated synth of instrumental album opener “Mystical Plosives” is followed by lead single “Aerial Troubles”, in which Laetitia Sadier declares in her trademark Gallic faux-nonchalance, “The numbing is not working anymore”. This is the proclamation of a band who knows that if anyone is well-equipped enough to cut through the bullshit and the spectacle it’s them. As a way of re-introducing themselves after fifteen years away, it’s invigorating and merciless to their peers.

While many of Stereolab’s signature moves are on display on Instant Holograms on Metal Film – Andy Ramsay’s motorik drums and Tim Gane’s phased guitars punctuate “Melodie Is A Wound” and “Esemplastic Creeping Eruption”, while “Transmuted Matter” lies horizontal in a bed of mallet percussion – these arrangement choices never feel gratuitous or as if the band are merely playing to the gallery. This is thanks, in part, to their ability to play with the structures of songs and arrangements, to deconstruct and reconstruct them before our very eyes and ears. Stereolab have always been at their most exciting when they play with songs like putty in their hands, marvelling at the shapes they are able to create.

Nowhere on the album is this done to greater effect than on “Immortal Hands”, a song which contains a dozen different ideas about what a Stereolab song should sound like within its six-and-a-half-minute runtime, never settling on one vision for more than a moment. What begins as a dreamy acoustic guitar and piano-led pop song goes through several jittery, electronic transmutations before concluding with a slice of brass-led bossa nova courtesy of Ben LaMar Gay and Bitchin Bajas’ Rob Frye. By the time the song fades out, its relatively conventional opening seems a distant memory.

“Immortal Hands” also shares with both “Vermona F Transistor” and album highlight “Le Coeur Et La Force” the twinkling unease of a horror-film soundtrack by John Carpenter or Italian proggers Goblin. Tim Gane’s work soundtracking Peter Strickland’s In Fabric during the band’s hiatus evidently haunts this record. So too does the fact that Stereolab’s long-hoped-for return initially began on the stage. For a group so often criticised for the coldness and the metronomic aloofness of their catalogue, this is a record that sounds warm, tactile, and is evidently the outcome of five musicians spending six years on the road together.

Just as heartening as the quality of the music is the fact that Sadier’s lyrics remain incisive and artfully stark. On “Immortal Hands”, architectural symbols of power are ridiculed as “Ego skyscraper[s] erect and collapsible / Nihilistic and vulgar”, while on “Melodie Is A Wound” the “war economy is inviolable” and “Truthfulness has fallen in desuetude”. It would be easy to conclude that Stereolab’s politics – the practical socialism and utopian anti-capitalism that they have been expounding since 1992’s Peng! – feel particularly timely in today’s climate. In reality, the band’s politics have always been prescient and urgent. The hope is simply that now we are ready to stop sneering and to start listening. When the music is this good, that’s no chore.