Stereolab
Margerine Eclipse
Elektra

Michael Frayn's seminal farce "Noises Off" is a three-act study of human lives falling apart. The show portrays the doomed attempts to stage and perform a play, "Nothing On." Obstacles as varied as backstage rivalries, an alcoholic performer and set-design snafus take their toll on the production until, by act three, actors miss entrances, fall down stairs, bring offstage squabbles onstage, skip pages of text and invent whole scenes (terribly) on the spot. Through it all, though, one character is a beacon of consistency: Brooke Ashton, a full-on bubble-headed blonde, who sticks to every theatrical gesture and mannered line reading that she used in the first rehearsals, refusing to improvise or even acknowledge the surrounding chaos.

Stereolab is like Brooke Ashton. Its music is maddeningly consistent. Not everyone needs to be David Bowie, but there's nothing wrong with change. Stereolab's latest album, Margerine Eclipse, is the band's ninth full album in twelve years; recently, band member Mary Hansen was fatally hit by a truck and the past few years have featured a bit of global change and upheaval, wouldn't you say? Yet Margerine Eclipse sounds like every album the band has released since 1996's Emperor Tomato Ketchup. A healthy dose of electronica, preferably minimalist, augmented with some hip-hop and dance beats to distinguish the band from Kraftwerk. Add to this the vaguely loungey psychedelia that featured prominently in the "head party" scene in Midnight Cowboy. Sing in French if you're of a mind.

It's almost as if the group recorded all the songs from its past five albums in a fit of inspiration in 1995 and has been sleepily doling them out ever since.

Margerine Eclipse has some nice moments. "Feel and Triple," a tribute to Hansen (to whom the album is dedicated), is delicately melodic and lyrically more expressive than dogmatic. "As much as I don't want/ I have to say goodbye," is an uncommon sentiment in a Stereolab song, and it's quite touching. (Stereolab's lyrics brim with philosophical and spiritual messages. "La Demeure" begins, "People are pressed, liberties crushed/ Shouldn't it resound/ Cry of our soul?" It might be preachy if the music, and Laetitia Sadier's singing, weren't so airy.) The opening track, "Vonal Declosion," is augmented with bright keyboards, a romantic and jazzy lead guitar line, a judicious use of strings in the break and sensuous harmonies. "Cosmic Country Noir," which extols the virtues of a simple, rural life, is powered by a beautiful melody line and some muscular guitar and drum work. It's the one song on the album that leans on the rhythm section rather than walls of keyboards and techno studio noise. It achieves something resembling relentlessness.

Still, there's nothing new under the sun in the world of Stereolab. Diehards will enjoy Margerine Eclipse simply because it exists and isn't lousy. The curious might have heard "The Noise of Carpet" in the retro clothing store and decided to take a chance. But if you're looking to add one of its albums to your collection (and there is no good reason to own more than one), take the cream of the crop, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, which explodes with the confidence of a band that had been looking for its definitive sound — a coherence of avant-garde experimentation, dance beat and melody that captivates but does not anesthetize — and found it.

Stereolab's catalog is dotted with sublime melody and inventive production, but as track after track wind their lugubrious way past patient ears, there comes a nagging feeling that the band is the musical equivalent of Stanley Kubrick. There is no song that rocks like Beth Orton rocks; there is no song as unabashedly lounge-poppy as Henry Mancini; there is no song as aggressively techno as Neu! Instead, there are representations of the aforementioned, very cerebrally and painstakingly constructed. It's not unlike the camera work of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, which presents events surrounding the European wars as a series of watercolors, and features long master shots of messengers approaching Ryan O'Neal from a distance with scrolls in their hands, and a camera pan from violinists playing to a harpischordist to a flautist to the attending audience that lasts a very, very long time. It's exquisite, but too considered. And so is Stereolab: it's ambient-techno pop once removed, which is curious, but not particularly engaging. It's as correct and empty as a sweeping arm movement of Brooke Ashton, always done at the same time, in the same way, whether the play is firing on all cylinders or the scenery is falling down around her.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)