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[Indie rock]

Stereolab

Chemical Chords

Spencer Patterson

Thu, Aug 21, 2008 (midnight)

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Convenient as it might be to trace Stereolab’s continued stretch of relative mediocrity back to the loss of longtime member Mary Hansen, in truth the slippage dates well beyond the 2002 bicycle accident that claimed Hansen’s life. While most every release in the nearly-two-decades-old group’s catalog contains moments of vitality and discovery, none—ether LP or EP—has felt indispensable in its entirety since 1997’s Dots and Loops.

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Beyond the Weekly
Stereolab
Stereolab on Billboard.com

New disc Chemical Chords, though appreciably more enjoyable than immediate album predecessors Sound-Dustand Margerine Eclipse, again fails to live up to the band’s classic ’90s output. For every primo cut—cheery opener “Neon Beanbag,” the courtly title track, hypno-pop ditty “Valley Hi!,” throbbing closer “Vortical Phonotheque”—there are at least two throwaways (“Nous Vous Demandons Pardon,” an overlong track built atop a rather annoying repeated Moog pattern, for one). And that poor ratio only feeds concern over the once-lionized songwriting duo of Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier.

Has Stereolab fallen victim to its own uniqueness? Surely a band can only swirl German kraut-rock, French lounge-pop and Brazilian tropicalia together so many times without beginning to sound too much like itself. And though Stereolab-by-numbers may be satisfactory for some, it’s tough to endure for those with memories long enough to know how groundbreaking a visit to the ’Lab once felt.

The bottom line: **1/2

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