AWmusic

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

Excuse the histrionics and the cheap nod to Ginsburg, please. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so excited about seeing a band which has over the years dropped the qualifier from its label “experimental pop.” Chemical Chords is a good album but compared with one of my favourites, Dots and Loops, or the monstre sacre Emperor Tomato Ketchup, it just doesn’t hold up. One song moves to another swimmingly, there are bouncy songs and there are melodic stretches which remind that Laetitia Sadier and Tim Gane are extraordinary songwriters, “Silver Sands” is especially beautiful, but nothing strikes out unexpectedly; it’s like having dinner with familiar friends: warm but excusably boring sometimes.

When they took the stage, however, I forgot all my impressions and volleyed into Stereolab’s performance. “Percolator” was the first song; I had expected it to be included in their set, and they played it beautifully, with the bass wrapped tightly around the tearing synths. For about an hour and a half, the band whipped out unexpected numbers like “Le Boob Oscilator” and expected ones like “French Disco,” and “Ping-Pong,” the last of which I am sure you have heard, was the recent favourite song of John McCain’s daughter (alternately known as spawn of the soft-spoken tyrant), on the campaign blog trail.

The highlight was the last song before the encore, possibly my favourite by the band, “Cybele’s Reverie,” during which a man in the audience (near me) went loco and began head-butting others around him. Without a string quartet to outfit them, Stereolab nevertheless pulled off a stunning performance of the piece. With one of their (male) synth players singing the late Mary Hansen’s parts, the band managed to communicate childhood nostalgia despite that the majority of the audience did not speak French—Lataetia tested us. After the encore, Tim Gane (the guitarist) threw his set-list into the audience and I had an OMG moment when I caught it. Written on the back of a fragment of cardboard from a beer box, it is now the coolest thing tacked to my wall.

The parts I appreciated from the concert were the noisier, drone-leaden, segments, the longer, older songs where the guitarist sat on a single chord for four minutes or something. Though they left out some lovely numbers like “Metronomic Underground” and “Les Ypers Sound,” with a catalogue as large as theirs one can expect that. It was a great show; whatever was lacking in The Groop’s performance was probably covered by one of the two openers: Monade, featuring Laeticia Sadier (Stereolab’s primary singer), which reminded one of the main act in its many shades, and Le Loupe, an American pop band with a breadth of sounds. In the end, I left the Phoenix with a satisfied sigh.

Silver Sands
Percolator
Cybele’s Reverie

Tags: concert