French Marxists Make Pop Music

It seems like Stereolab has been around forever. The band's latest album, Margerine Eclipse, sounds as if it was recorded by either a long-forgotten krautrock band who toiled in a cramped Cologne basement thirty years ago, or a kitschy lounge-pop act accustomed to playing at a cocktail bar on Mars, a hundred years from today.

One of the most appealing aspects of Stereolab's music is this interminable quality: listening to it leaves the vague sensation -- simultaneously comforting and exciting -- that you've heard all these songs before but were half-asleep, or had the volume turned down, or just simply forgot.

On their albums, Stereolab itself seem confused about its time and place, creating music for a world where the 21st century we know never happened and instead was replaced with a utopian version, conceived in the early 60s, where men and women fly to work in bubble cars and, inexplicably, speak French. This mix-up of styles and aesthetics is half the fun of the band's music.

With this in mind, Margerine Eclipse is a successful Stereolab album if only because it carries on this tradition of hazy ageless-ness. Sure, it sounds like every album the band has made before (and probably will make in the future), just as it sounds like both the result of, and inspiration for all the musical influences appropriated here: the propulsive but spacey German band Neu!, the sophisticated pop of Burt Bacharach, the jazz pretensions of Chicago post-rockers like Jim O'Rourke and John McEntire (both of whom worked as producers for the band at one point, leaving a noticeable mark), and the "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music" of Esquivel. God knows what other retro-, avant-garde, or simply obscure musical styles can be found on Margerine Eclipse.

The usual criticism leveled against Stereolab is that all of its albums and songs sound uniform and uninteresting. While this has never been entirely true, there certainly was a point there in the late '90s when the band was making relatively colorless, dull music. The best possible thing that can be said about Margerine Eclipse is that this period seems to be over. The songs here might not be as rough-hewn as the band's early material, or as funky as their mid-period albums, but thankfully they never become as gratingly "lite" as the records directly preceding Margerine.

As has been the case with Stereolab of late, the best songs on Margerine Eclipse are the most structured, the least noodling. "Bop Scotch," the tightest track on the album, starts out light and wispy before turning on a dime into something resembling the Surfaris with synths. "Margerine Rock" and "Hillbilly Motorbike" both recall Stereolab playing the simple, driving motortik they do best. And even the most free-form tracks are fun enough to redeem the slower parts on Margerine; "La Demeure," for example, conjures up an interesting groove to make up for its general aimlessness. Then there are suite songs like "Dear Marge" and "Cosmic Country Noir," songs that cycle through different musical styles, occasionally playing off a unifying theme or hook. These types of songs are a Stereolab specialty and they're as effective as ever here.

As its title obliquely alludes, Margerine Eclipse is a tribute to Mary Hansen, a singer for Stereolab through much of their career, who was killed last year in a bicycling accident. The thought of the band members creating a dark, brooding epic as a tribute to Mary is inconceivable, their music being so indebted to the lighter side of things (then again, this has never stopped them from singing about Marxism). But the music on Mary's tribute album still sounds like plastic and bubbles throughout and doesn't get any gloomier than merely wistful. Her death was certainly tragic but it seems to have given the band a new purpose, one that will ensure its already strange timelessness.