“Purposefully short, dense, fast pop songs.”
Tim Gane, Stereolab
If you discount Fab Four Suture, the EP collection of 2006, Chemical Chords is the first album proper from Stereolab since 2004's Margerine Eclipse.
The eleventh album in an illustrious career, Chemical Chords began life in early-2007 when Tim Gane started messing with “a series of about seventy tiny drum loops” on top of improvised chord sequences using piano and vibraphone. “Building them up from there – later slowing the tracks down or speeding them up – a totally new way of doing songs for us…”
With typical prolificacy, the band laboured over the summer at their studio, Instant Zero (in Bordeaux, France), helping transform these blueprints into 32 luminous new songs, with keyboardist/technician Joe Watson manning the mixing desk. Half the new repertoire was selected for this album, which, for all the breathless spontaneity of its invention, is arguably the band’s
tautest, most highly focused work this century.
Being released by Duophonic UHF Disks / 4AD, Chemical Chords is a collection of “purposefully short, dense, fast pop songs,” according to Gane, brimming with Motown-like drums, O’Hagan’s finest baroque-pop brass and string arrangements and etched with some of Sadier’s most eloquent, mellifluous vocal performances to date, it is, nonetheless, classic Stereolab; like all their best work, a perfect equipoise between an implausibly cool past and a shamelessly exotic future.
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