Stereolab - Fab Four Suture (Too Pure)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
The best reviews, often, are ones where records get utterly slated, but in a way that means you subsequently develop a desire to hear the record. Surely, you wonder, it couldn't have been that bad? Such was this scribe's first encounter with the name Stereolab, a review of their 'Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night' album getting a nothing out of ten appraisal in the New Musical Express in such a descriptive, disappointed fashion that it made me think there must be some worth in the band somewhere for someone to actually care that much about them writing a dodgy record.
Years later, I'm finding this review difficult to write one handed, as I'm using the other to heartily pat myself on the back for being correct in that prior assumption. If there's one thing you can say about Stereolab, it's that they're worth the investigation - and if, fourteen albums in, this is your first encounter with the quartet, there's one heck of a lot of catching up to do.
For now, the task in hand is assessing 'Fab Four Suture', and either down to my shamefully only recently coming to know the 'lab or this actually being a rather fascinating piece of music, it shan't be coming away as empty handed as '...Milky Night' once did all that time ago, at the hands of a more avid yet dissatisfied admirer. The concept is an interesting one, too - initially released as individual pieces of vinyl throughout the preceding year, 'Fab Four Suture' is in a sense a compilation of these works. Due to the smoothness of the flow here, one very much gets the impression that this wasn't just the intermittent fruit of a series of sessions, but a project very much conceived of as eventually being a whole album.
The actual sound of it can range from nearly camp, brazenly European sounding brass band music (both respective parts of 'Kybernetica Babicka', which open and close the disc) to the more temptingly seductive, softly twinkling proceeds of the centrepiece 'Visionary Road Maps' or marvellously peculiar 'I Was A Sunny Rainphase' (what?). It's always fidgeting, uncomfortable with letting long, atmospheric chord progressions take centre stage and instead finding more favour with having notes jump and jitter all over the sonic palette, never allowing one within earshot to actually expect what happens next.
Very likely, for many this will lead for a prickly listening experience, despite the gorgeously deadpan voice of Laetitia Sadier sounding like honey in your ears all the way through it. But if it's off kilter, inventive pop music that just won't sit still you crave, then 'Fab Four Suture', providing you haven't bought the composite singles previously released already, is just the ticket. Far from disappointed, I'm now a walking advert.
Artists in this article: Stereolab
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