Fab Four Suture

Stereolab

(Too Pure/Beggars)



Stereolab is getting old. Not in a fully bad way, but in the way that anything middle-aged becomes a little more predictable and a little less exciting. “Fab Four Suture,” the band’s latest release, culls together a year or so of music, previously released only on vinyl, and packs it into a single album, available, depending on your level of connoisseurship, as a CD, a limited edition double 10”, or a triple 7”. Variety’s great, but the elaborate release strategy for “Fab Four,” the group’s fourteenth full-length album, hints at something else: this music can’t quite sell itself.

Battling everything from bad reviews to bizarre bicycling accidents, Stereolab’s had it pretty tough the last couple of years. There have been personnel shifts, distracting side projects, and, most damaging, the death of vocalist Mary Hansen. This hectic beginning to the millennium seems to have left Stereolab a bit dazed, a shell of its former self. Try as they might, the group’s most recent release sounds like they’re just going through the motions.

There’s very little on “Fab Four” that we haven’t seen before stylistically. Here we find the same loose reverb and spacey harmonies, the same collages of cheesy Farfisa-type organ sounds, the same sometimes-baffling vocal lines that sound more like language-learning dictation exercises than pop hooks. This is an eclectic recipe that has worked for Stereolab before, producing 15 years of consistent and occasionally great music. “Fab Four” comes down solidly on the side of consistent.

This is no “Dots and Loops” or “Emperor Tomato Ketchup,” the group’s mid-90’s pinnacles. But what sounded revolutionary ten years ago sounds very standard now.

This isn’t to say the album’s bad—it’s more just uninteresting. There are a couple of keepers here—both parts of “Kyberneticka Babicka,” for example, are fun, up-tempo odes to multi-track layering. “Plastic Mile” has an appealingly vintage funk-rock beat under a schizophrenic self-duet from lead singer Laetitia Sadier, and “Whisper Pitch” is a more-successful-than-usual foray into psychedelic syncopation that morphs into a pretty ballad.

In these songs, though, are just about the only musical moments that manage to separate themselves from the synth soup that is the rest of the record, and even these seeming standouts will struggle for attention once added to Stereolab’s already enormous back catalog.

Stereolab hasn’t made much bad music—there’s still enough spark and talent left in them to keep their standards just high enough—but they don’t turn every synthesizer they touch into gold anymore, either. That should be enough to keep those old Stereolab records spinning; there’s no reason to replace them with “Fab Four.”