June 1, 2000

The First Of The Microbe Hunters

The mini-album, the extended EP - call it what you will, but it's a vexing item....

7 / 10 The mini-album, the extended EP - call it what you will, but it's a vexing item. Even length fails as a viable criteria, for at a shade under 40 minutes this seven-track effort offers as much music as was the norm in the pre-CD era. So here's an album that doesn't call itself an album, for which the most common explanations are over-fecundity or laziness. And although Stereolab could hardly be accused of the latter, the fact that a B-side session turned unexpectedly fruitful doesn't necessarily justify releasing it.

What 'The First Of The Microbe Hunters' amounts to is six tracks Stereolab presumably didn't think worth keeping for their next 'proper' album, plus one from the 'Dots And Loops' sessions in 1997, and therefore deemed unsuitable for the album before last. It's not a recipe designed to court the floating voter. Ironic, then, that those who regard themselves inured to this band's singular charms might actually find '...Microbe Hunters' rather palatable, given that it eases up on the rigorous deconstructivist tendencies that have so permeated the last two 'Lab records, taking a cue instead from the carefree effervescence typical of recent live encounters.

/img/Stereolab0500.jpg Indeed, opener 'Outer Bongolia' delivers on this premise quite bountifully, an insistent sunsplash of urgent groove and excessive organ flim-flam that stretches out for nine wordless minutes like 'Riders On The Storm'-meets-'Mambo No 5'. As well as its typically epigrammatic title, 'Barock - Plastik' earns kudos for chopping Laetitia Sadier's icy Gallic peal into funky relief, much in the way Eno-period Talking Heads sexed up David Byrne's chaste geek-speak. There's an agreeable cosiness to these sounds, like the band walked in to the workplace that day to find the amps already seductively buzzing and decided not to turn on the Mac after all. That said, the John McEntire-produced offcut, 'I Feel The Air (Of Another Planet)', is minutely constructed around a pulsing vocal loop, but its elegiac deportment and contemplative guitar shimmers might well have felt out of place on the fussy parent record.

Always different, always the same, Stereolab have long stood accused of being too clever by half. It is what they are and they are what they is. Yet even class swots have to kick back sometimes, in the process offering this merry endorsement of the abbreviated album.