Cosmonautic Kaleidoscope Mayonaisse

AKA: STEREOLAB R.I.P.

Stereolab--as I've already mentioned my favorite band of all time by like an embarrassingly wide margin--have finally called it quits, at least for the moment.

To anyone who's followed their loooong career this is no surprise: their albums have been diminishing in urgency and innovation for years; the music press has gotten bored with and sometimes even overtly hostile about their longevity;* and the once-married songwriting team of Laetitia Sadier and Tim Gane appear to have transitioned from being amicable ex-partners to visibly disliking each other.

I've never hid the fact of my Stereolab obsession from anyone--when my oldest friends think of me, the words that probably come most quickly to mind are Marlboro Reds, my onetime cigarette-brand; Pauline Kael, my then and probably still favorite writer; and Stereolab--but since about 1999 I've known letting that fact be known was doing nothing for my image. (I'd probably raise fewer "huh, really?" eyebrows if I claimed to love Celine Dion above all others.) Exactly what had made them so unique when they started out--the gnomic inscrutibility of their name, their song and album titles, and their self- and stage-presentation; the pretty, graphic impersonality of their album artwork; the album-by-album consistency of their sound; even the sheer prodigiousness of their output--became a liability to most listeners, a mark of creative exhaustion. This? Again?

My reaction to hearing new Stereolab material is actually the same as theirs: This, again, but in a sweet, slow, stepping-into-a-hot-bath-after-a-long-day "ahhhhhhh" way, not a dismissive "meh" way. Whatever the unique-if-tiny pleasure center in our brains that's only activated by listening to Stereolab is, it's a space or a button I've been all too happy to keep pressing, over and over and over again for the past fifteen years...a full half of my life!

Their most recent album Chemical Chords was a marginal return to form after the uninspired and overly familiar singles compilation Fab Four Suture and the sometimes brilliant but tinny and overcompressed-sounding Margerine Eclipse, but it had only one absolutely essential song on it: the seductively plodding and Brian-Wilsonesque "The Ecstatic Static."

But in the six or so months since the album came out I've probably listened to that one song upwards of 150 times, and I can honestly say its marriage of sound and lyrical content continues to teach me new things about life and beauty and courage and fear and death every time I hear it. Sadier sings: This beat, the purpose, in my heart, generates, infinite energy. Tim Gane has claimed to care nothing for song lyrics, even Stereolab's own, but surely he must recognize what Sadier's words do for that track: they explain, heighten, and manifest the beauty latent within it. The heavy, lockstep drum "beat" does "generate" infinite energy...that is, the freer play of the horns and strings and vocals above it. Sadier's lyrics for "The Ecstatic Static" are a beautiful diagram...of what is beautiful in Gane's music.

If the future albums they will now no longer go on to record would've possessed just one song each as good as that song, then their decision to suspend the group is a decision worth mourning.

* Poor critics! By producing so much gorgeous music and so little drama, Stereolab made the job of saying anything new about them so difficult!