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INSTANT HOLOGRAMS ON METAL FILM (S5 | E237)
What are Stereolab, exactly? Folding seemingly incompatible elements into a blend that’s both natural and outlandish, the veteran post-rockers have never been easy to define—they only stopped evolving when they hung up their hat in 2009. The Groop regrouped in 2019; Instant Holograms on Metal Film is the band’s first studio album in 15 years. But despite a tracklisting that reads almost like parody—“Mystical Plosives,” “Vermona F Transistor,” the quintessentially ’Lab-esque “Esemplastic Creeping Eruption”—the record doesn’t suggest any particularly easy answers.
SUMMER VIBES
Instant Holograms on Metal Film brings a new producer (Bitchin Bajas’ Cooper Crain), new musicians (jazz cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, percussionist Ric Elsworth), and new vocalists (including Marie Merlet, formerly of Sadier’s Monade) into the Stereolab orbit. Nevertheless, the album sounds resolutely Stereolab. Most of the key qualities that define the band are present and correct—motorik chug, bubbling Moogs, odd analog squiggles, and, above all, Sadier’s vocals, cool but engaged, glowing with the discreet passion of a hotel lobby rendezvous. The record also has touches of the radical vocal interplay that Sadier and the late Mary Hansen perfected in Stereolab’s mid-’90s imperial phase, when the two singers transcended rockist ideas of lead and backing vocal in favor of a gorgeously interlaced, ego-free fusion. – Pitchfork
Instant Hologram on Metal Film (S5 | E237)
Instant Hologram on Metal Film (S5 | E237)
