Monade - 'A Few Steps More' (Too Pure)
3/5
By: Toby L
Just what happened to my French? I remember being blinding at it in school. Even that reflexive stuff.
A confrontation with Laetitia Sadier's Monade makes me yearn for those days when I knew how to spell swear-words en francais and all the rest of it. It's that elegant and worthwhile a side-project.
'A Few Steps More' is the Stereolab front-woman's out-of-'Lab operative, a charmingly clean and well-kept pop sojourn of keyboard-based, chiming-guitar pop for the smart-casual, vinyl-flicking thirty-something, whose indulgence in coffee-table mopping-up is not so much an occasional daily necessity, but a neurotic compulsion. So pleasant and walk-in-the-park delivered, Monade are the cleanest, most straight-edge and fascinatingly emotion-starved band we've heard all year. Somehow, it's truly uplifting.
And even when the chord-structures go a bit zombie (the title-track; like Air guesting with Gorky's Zygotic Mynci), 'A Few More Steps' is still mind-numbingly pleasant. Sadier never has been one for anything starved of grace. 'La Salle Des Pas Perdus' is like elevator music for the terminally bemused, with dizzying vocal-swapping and trumpets to boot. The stop-start 'Das Kind', meanwhile, makes us dream of browsing for striped jerseys in florescent supermarkets, in a pseudo, real-life interpretation of either the Pulp/'Common People' or Blur/'The Universal' videos. So detached from any sense of drama, 'A Few Steps More' is quite a numbing experience.
But in this arrives a comfort. It's laissez-faire easy listening for the over-worked and under-loved, all capped with a voice (Sadier's) and intelligence so unprocessed, it's the most impossibly, unlikely fulfilling listen this spring. And just like its partnering season, given some time and attention, Monade will blossom stridently.
Artists in this article: Monade
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