Albums by this artist

Sound-Dust (2001)

Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night (1999)

Dots And Loops (1997)

Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1996)

Stereolab

Dots And Loops

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» PIERO SCARUFFI | STAFF WRITER

Stereolab Dots And Loops Elektra, 1997 RiYL: Tortoise, Jessamine, Magnog, Sonic Youth, The Sea & Cake

On Dots And Loops, Stereolab immediately abdicates the sweet, futurist harmony it had coined on Emperor Tomato Ketchup and refolds "lounge" into relaxed, disengaged cocktail kitsch. The minimalist "Brakhage," the warbled, polyphonic "The Flower Called Nowhere" and the exotic accents of "Prisoner Of Mars" exploit the same formula to the point of nausea: a light, funky rhythm, an arrangement that's a little bit kitschy, and a rolling chorus. At its best, it plays out in a track like "Miss Modular," which sounds like a '60s television theme song.

Forgiving the frequent mishaps of the album's first half, Stereolab crown Dots And Loops with the nine-minute "Contronatura." The band employ the same blueprint as on most of the other songs, but this time it's with a more intellectual feel -- on a stubbornly strummed guitar and hallucinogenic, droning keyboards.

And if that's not enough, there's the 17-minute long "Refractions In The Plastic Pulse," which deconstructs yet another kitsch-y theme (as if Stereolab allegorically reneged its whole album) through opera-style falsettos, aquatic electronics, dreamy dub pulses and tiny, incidental cacophonies. Laetitia Sadier's vocals are still a guilty pleasure, even if her lyrics seem to exist in another time and place entirely than the accompanying music ("We need so damn / Many things / To keep our stupid / Lives going," she sighs on "Brakhage," while a friendly groove slinks along underneath).

Three producers lent their knobs to Dots And Loops: John McEntire of Tortoise in Chicago and Andi Toma and Jan Wermer (Mouse On Mars) in Dusseldorf. On tracks like "Refractions," McEntire's direction comes over almost too prominently, foreshadowing the American post-rock/German electronica hybrid sound on Stereolab's followup to this album, Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night. That's by no means a bad thing, but on Dots And Loops, not all the kinks have been ironed out.

PIERO SCARUFFI | Piero Scaruffi runs the exhaustive music database Scaruffi.com. A native of Italy, he has also been praised for his work on the General Theory of Relativity, formal theories of the mind, and artificial intelligence. And no, we aren't making that up.