Needless to say, Stereolab have, with Margerine Eclipse, crafted another batch of exceptional songs that at the same time manage to somehow sound both cheerful and melancholic.
The band is back in top form here: Laetitia Sadier's vocals are as gorgeous and plaintive as ever, and Tim Gane's music, still toying with krautrock and faux-lounge, is as creative as it has always been.
As with all Stereolab albums there are so many musical twists and turns to the songs that it invariably takes forever to feel confident that you have digested the record, and this is no less true for Margerine Eclipse.
However, everything that makes Stereolab great is present: the melodies, the counter-melodies; the vocals, the counter-vocals; the bleeps, the bloops; and the lyrics that waver between gentle existentialism, love-poetry and primitive Marxism.
Margerine Eclipse is dedicated to Mary Hansen, Stereolab's keyboardist/second vocalist, who died in a tragic car accident while riding her bicycle in 2002.
Ironically - actually, I'm not sure whether this is ironic at all - but, ironically, it's only now that Mary Hansen is absent that I realise just how intrinsic she was to Stereolab's sound.
Margerine Eclipse looks like this:
Get it, don't get it, I don't care. But if you're in any way serious about music you should probably own at least one Stereolab album. Perhaps you might consider the soon-to-be-released singles and EP-collection, Oscillons from the Anti-Sun.
sometimes I don't ask the questions I know I should ask for fear of the answers I know I will receive, as if, somehow, by not asking the questions I exorcise the answers
Reviewed on Tuesday, 26 April 2005