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New Statesman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Jarvis Cocker at 61: Is this hardcore?
Photo byAre we in the era of the Mature Reunion Album? long hoped for but largely unexpected album releases lately by Blur, Everything But The Girl, Stereolab, and now Pulp, measuring the middle-age of both artist and audience. More, released on 6 June 2025, is the eighth Pulp album (their seventh came out just weeks after 9/11.) On Friday they re-united at the O2 and, fittingly, the album topped the UK Charts that night: Pulp's audience wanted More. When Pulp take to the stage, it is in front of a red velvet backdrop, the now expanded eight-piece band augmented by string section. Jarvis Cocker ascends the stage alone on a podium. The age-appropriate indie chug of opener 'Spike Island' is uplifting, but a little more ordinary than their 1990s material, which fused together two distinctly Yorkshire traditions: Alan Bennett observational comedy and specifically Sheffield electronic futurism. Cocker, 61, dressed in a dark, double-breasted suit, addresses the audience with the ease and command of a broadcaster. 'Once we're alive,' says the frontman early in the set, 'we have to grow up. The first step of growing up is clapping in time.' He invites the audience to join him in this 'developmental milestone', a neat bit of crowd control that tees up Mature Reunion Album track 'Grown-Ups', and one of tonight's surprise themes. Pulp's intergenerational appeal is apparent across the stadium. Older parents now bring grown-up children. Though their audience is noticeably broad – only a few lone aesthetes adopt the frontman's signature specs and vintage suits – Cocker remains the patron saint of people who hate stag do's and visit charity shops long after their salaries have stopped necessitating that. More than this, Pulp endure as cool, evidenced by Charli XCX's recent on stage call for a 'Pulp summer' at Coachella Festival in a way that impossible to imagine her doing for Blur. On the London stage, each of Pulp's Mature Reunion Album tracks have an unconscious double in their earlier work. 'Farmer's Market', a ballad Cocker says tonight is about how he met his wife, in the audience – hustling her phone number at the car park of an organic food bazaar – obsesses over the same questions of chance and fate as 1995's 'Something Changed', which tonight is delivered acoustic by the four nucleus Pulp members (happily, viewed together, they still look more like a departmental meeting than an arena rock group.) Ditto new song 'Tina' is a pen portrait of late middle-aged lust on a commuter train (which also contains a good reference to Mrs Thatcher's TINA acronym.) It's a greyer haired update of 'Disco 2000', their 1995 glam rock stomp about the memory of teenage sexual obsession. Listening to Pulp's greatest hits CD on my early teenage paper round in the 2000s, I remember feeling so scandalised and compelled by all the sex in their work that I worried I should keep this enjoyment private (lest it reveal something inadvertently awful about myself). There is less of this side of Pulp tonight, their more subversive songs about tragedies in reservoirs or exacting sexual revenge against West Londoners have been temporarily retired, to be our-age appropriate. This dulls some of Pulp's weird appeal. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Cocker's best writing was first as a misfit outsider in his native Sheffield, then as a geographical and class outsider in 90s media London. But that success made him something of an insider, which his writing has never really reckoned with. Cocker is one of his generation's cultural luminaries. He is a longstanding BBC broadcaster, a Meltdown curate and broadsheet arts fave whose collected lyrics are published by Faber. Now, the albums he infrequently releases seldom examine what exactly this type of life is like. Pulp's last big statement forms the unexpected high point of tonight's set. Introducing 'This Is Hardcore', the title track of their 1998 album, Cocker sits at the top of a small illuminated staircase (metaphor klaxon), splayed across a leather Mastermind chair and sipping an espresso, which is brave at 9PM. Against a seedy, dramatic loop, which repeats and throbs like erotic fixation, Cocker purrs about wanting it now, wanting it bad. The song's lyrics were written to compare the singer's experience of fame to what he termed his 'revulsion and attraction' to pornography, all with the subtext of his then escalating cocaine use. I had to get a little past paper round age to learn to love that part of the hits CD. Tonight, four songs come from This Is Hardcore, and it's in this material that Cocker delivers his most captivating performances of the night. Perhaps now that the album's chief obsessions of fame, pornography and cocaine have all accelerated in the 2020s, it has widened that album's appeal. The final third of the set runs through their big, 1990s hit singles. The biggest of which is 'Common People'. 'Common People' was conceived as a fanfare, but looking around tonight it's something of a requiem for a period when strange, five-minute songs about class somehow topped the charts. But it's never typically the biggest songs that get you in arena shows. Earlier, during 'Help The Aged', another This Is Hardcore cut, Cocker invites the audience to sing a falsetto refrain that he can seemingly no longer summon as his baritone has grown older, and the line 'funny how it all falls away' flashes on the screens for our benefit. Like 'Eleanor Rigby', 'Help The Aged' is one of those rare songs that peers out from pop's cult of youth, and is alarmed by what it finds there. 'Old age isn't a battle,' wrote Philip Roth in 2006's Everyman, 'old age is a massacre.' Guitarist Mark Webber's scuzzy, vengeful guitar part sounds suitably blood-shedding. There's a line in the song about dying your hair: the one thing you can change as time bulldozes on. As the line is delivered, a woman in front of me smiles at her partner, ruffles his grey hair, and cuddles up to him. Pulp's work has found a new theme. Something scary, something you might view with revulsion and attraction, something really hardcore: getting old. [See more: The rise of the west] Related
New Statesman
04-06-2025
- Business
- New Statesman
The lost futures of Stereolab
Photo by Joe Dilworth Nikolai Kondratiev was born in Russia in 1892. An influential theorist of the New Economic Policy under Lenin, in the 1920s he pioneered the idea that would define his posthumous reputation. Capitalist economies, he argued, underwent predictable cycles of about 50 years' growth followed by stagnation. In 1938, Kondratiev fell out of favour and was executed under Stalin's Great Purge. But after his death, his theory found acclaim in the West, memorialised as 'supercycles', or the Kondratiev wave. One small ripple from this theoretical legacy came in the summer of 1994, on the fringes of the British Top 40 singles chart. A basic schooling on the Kondratiev wave could be found in the lyrics of 'Ping Pong' by the avant-pop band Stereolab, a catchy, three-minute single sung in French-accented English, and built around sultry electric organ and sparkling, understated guitars. The release peaked at 45, mounting no threat to that week's imperial Wet Wet Wet chart-topper. From the vantage of the mid 2020s, perhaps Nineties guitar bands require their own theory of stagnation and growth. After long absences, this summer sees a new album by Pulp and the live return of Oasis (the latter a group impelled by very different economic theories). At a quieter volume in the public consciousness, we now have a largely unexpected new album by Stereolab, the long-running project of onetime romantic partners Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier. Stereolab burst from the ruins of Eighties indie. Ilford-born Gane – a teenage devotee of experimental bands like Throbbing Gristle – was the guitarist in McCarthy, a badge-wearing socialist outfit whose verbose and accusatory songs included 'We Are All Bourgeois Now' and 'Should the Bible Be Banned'. At a 1988 Paris show, Gane met, and quickly began a relationship with, a McCarthy fan: Lætitia Sadier. Born in 1968, Sadier grew up in the eastern suburbs of Paris, interrupted by long stays in the US following her father's corporate job. Sadier briefly joined McCarthy before the band split in 1990. The pair then moved to south London, signed on to the dole, and plotted an entirely new project. By the Nineties, rock had amassed so much past that would-be musicians could pick a spot in virtually any niche of its history, and burrow there for a whole career. Stereolab's early releases were in thrall to the Seventies Düsseldorf duo Neu! and their propulsive, defiantly minimalist 4/4 beat. A rotating cast of musicians came and went around an unchanging nucleus of Gane, Sadier and the Australian guitarist Mary Hansen, whose bright, volleying harmonies with Sadier were the emotional centre of the band's sound. What set them apart was their politics. Gane wrote – and largely produced – the music, leaving lyrics entirely to Sadier. Delivered in a conversational but strident voice, Sadier sounded like a compelling sociology lecturer suddenly taking flight. On the single 'French Disko', which was performed on late-night TV's The Word, Sadier called for acts of 'rebellious solidarity' before a chorus of 'La Résistance!' But her lyrics tended towards affirmation rather than polemic. There was 'Ping Pong', with its Kondratiev chorus, and the playful 'Wow and Flutter', which does not on first listen sound as though it is questioning the supremacy of the IBM and US imperialism, but somehow pulls it off. In interviews, her political declarations were measured and playful, pondering to Melody Maker in 1993 what exactly to do about 'people like John Major' come the revolution. ('Do we kill them? Do we brainwash them? Do we get them to mop the streets?… That's a hell of a responsibility.') Through punk, the postwar Situationist International – a revolutionary Marxist alliance of artists and intellectuals – for a time held an outsized influence on pop music. You could detect their influence in Stereolab's fusing of anti-capitalist lyrics to the sounds of American consumerism, with their sincere adoption of Sixties bubblegum pop, easy listening and elevator Muzak. In the Eighties and Nineties, leftist bands as varying as the Style Council and the Manic Street Preachers practised entryism, smuggling leftist ideals through catchy pop. That was not Stereolab. 'I would go so far as to say we were avoiding going overground,' Sadier told the New York Times in 2019. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Instead, Stereolab protected their independence – releasing on their own Duophonic imprint – and got better. Between 1996 and 1999, Stereolab came good on the critic Simon Reynolds's declaration of the band as part of the 'post-rock' wave – meaning guitar bands who had been energised by the arrival of hip-hop and dance music. Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Dots and Loops and the sprawling Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, released consecutively, were among the finest alternative albums of the 1990s, coming at the exact moment Britpop ran out of road. Suddenly, this DIY indie project encompassed glitchy German techno, rhythmic Brazilian jazz, sleek and severe 20th-century minimalism and a collagist approach that beat hip-hop samplers at their own game (later, rap producers including J Dilla, Tyler, The Creator, and Pharrell Williams would sample and praise specifically this era of the band). Playful and psychedelic, Stereolab almost resolved political music's central dilemma – that anyone buying the object probably agrees with you already – by flooding their work with what the critic Mark Sinker dubbed 'portals', meaning references to counter-cultural history from filmmaker Stan Brakhage to synth pioneer Wendy Carlos. This couldn't last. Cobra and Phases… received a cruel, attention-seeking 0/10 review from the NME, terming them 'culturally pointless'. It was a harbinger of more than just a casually cruel media culture, proving 2000s indie rock and its skinny-jeans-wearing acolytes would revive just about anything but an interest in politics. And far worse, Stereolab were struck by tragedy. In 2002, Mary Hansen was killed in a traffic accident aged 36. Gane and Sadier separated, and a grief-stricken band lost their zeal. Stereolab's hiatus in 2009 barely caused a ripple. Instant Holograms on Metal Film is the first new Stereolab studio album since 2008's Chemical Chords. After reforming for what appeared to be a slightly awkward, financially necessitated reunion in 2019, something seemed to stick: Stereolab have toured whenever possible since. The first sounds on Instant Holograms are one minute of silvery, arpeggiated synthesizers, introducing the record like some long-lost Eighties television ident. 'Aerial Troubles', the first full-length song on the album, opens with Sadier's declaration – her voice deeper and richer – that 'the numbing is not/it is not working any more'. This is an album uniquely concerned with consumption, greed ('an unfillable hole, insatiable') and 'dying modernity'. Stereolab are back, and they've never sounded so disappointed. On first listen, it surprises that the bubblegum colours Stereolab painted in during the Nineties have been drained to a slightly more parched canvas. On repeat listens, this is to the album's benefit. If Instant Holograms is largely a retread of former Stereolab sounds – and it is – what is different and manages to convince, is its more downcast mood. 'Ego skyscraper, erect and collapsible', mourns Sadier on the mid-tempo, gently exploratory 'Immortal Hands', 'nihilistic and vulgar'. More than any other Stereolab release, Instant Holograms does not leave the subject of life under capitalism. The strange romantic songs or surreal asides that were once part of the band's coalition are this time absent. This could all be a bit much, but what separates Sadier from a bad case of what we might call the 'Ian Browns' (specifically the one-time Stone Roses frontman's dire Covid-sceptic barkings about 'masonic lockdowns' and '5G radiation') is the glacial, cool manner in which she delivers them. It is also the way that the music appears to offer solutions, glimpses of possibility. Take that track: what begins as a downcast plea suddenly fizzes into mutant disco, bursting bright with horns and recalling their most expansive material on the classic Dots and Loops. Ditto the track 'Vermona F Transistor', in which – against a lovely, woozy Tim Gane guitar line – Sadier's phrases begin to suddenly drown in bubbling, electronic vocal effects, rendering them absurd, suggesting their own slipperiness. Stereolab broke out at a time when – even for experimentally minded Marxists – the mood was playful and the forecast optimistic. Putting it mildly, this is not the case today. Instant Holograms will not command much of the same audience as Oasis's return, but the continuing appeal of both is more similar than either would admit: those listening to Stereolab will be hoping to set the clock back to half-past-the-Nineties as much as those in bucket hats at Heaton Park. But on the final song 'If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt 2', Sadier closes with a rebuke to the numbing that featured earlier in the album, emphasising the 'power to choose' and the 'courage to heal'. On Instant Holograms, Stereolab find new ways to explore and analyse the disappointing world around them. Useful lessons, some might say. 'Instant Holograms on Metal Film' by Stereolab is out now on Warp Records [See also: Lorde's Brat moment] Related
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
3 new songs and 3 new albums to check out this weekend
Welcome to our weekly music post, where we spotlight our favorite new songs and albums. Hop in the comments and tell us: What new music are you listening to? Since the release of Laura Stevenson's last album, which came out in 2021, the singer-songwriter has earned a master's degree in music therapy. She's putting those skills into practice with her upcoming album, Late Great (out June 27). 'When I started this [music therapy] career path a few years ago, I kind of quieted my own healing relationship to music, because I honestly didn't have time, but this record is me getting back to it. This is me processing, and reconnecting with that part of myself, and it carried me through,' Stevenson explained in a press release. On 'Honey,' Late Great's first single, Stevenson turns her focus inward, vulnerably assessing the damage of a break-up. 'Elderberry Wine,' the new track from Wednesday (released, appropriately, on a Wednesday), leans more heavily into the band's alt-country side than their occasional dalliances with shoegaze. Singer and guitarist Karly Hartzman's gorgeous vocals are a Trojan horse hiding a deep pain at the center of the lyrics. ''Elderberry Wine' is about the potential for sweet things in life (love, family, success) to become poison if not prepared for and attended to correctly,' Hartzman explained in a press release. Earlier this year, guitarist MJ Lenderman announced that he would no longer tour with the band, though he'd continue to record with them in the studio. Suede frontman Brett Anderson doesn't want listeners to have any illusions about the Britpop band's upcoming tenth album, Antidepressants (out September 5). 'This is broken music for broken people,' Anderson said in a press release. 'Disintegrate' is the first single, and it's also the album's opening track. 'Come down and disintegrate with me,' Anderson sings in the arena-ready chorus, and it's so catchy that he almost makes the bleak lyrics sound appealing. Quit To Play Chess is a posthumous album from Cola Boyy, a musician, community organizer, and disability activist who died in 2024. Cola Boyy's disco-inspired sound (he called himself a 'disabled disco innovator') permeates Quit To Play Chess, which pairs his passion for bringing people together with groovy beats. 'Tell me, is there Hennessy in heaven? / If not, I'm gonna nosedive straight to hell,' he sings on 'Babylon,' giving listeners a good idea of what made him such a magnetic presence both on stage and in real life. Bandcamp put together an excellent tribute to Cola Boyy that features interviews with his friends and musical collaborators like Mac DeMarco and Juan Wauters, and it highlights how special and unique he was as an artist, and what a loss it is that he's no longer with us. Good news: Stereolab is back, and they're just as weird and hard-to-define as ever. It's been 15 years since Stereolab's last album, 2010's Not Music, after which the band disbanded to work on other projects. Now, they've returned with a new album, Instant Holograms On Film. If song titles like 'Electrified Teenybop!' and 'Esemplastic Creeping Eruption' are any indication, Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier haven't lost a bit of their cerebral spark in their time apart. Edgar Wright's 2021 documentary The Sparks Brothers shined a long-overdue light on the relentlessly innovative band Sparks, who have been consistently releasing music since 1971. MAD! is the 25th album from the duo, which consists of brothers Ron and Russell Mael. The Maels' uncanny ability to reflect the current moment has always been one of their best magic tricks, and it's present here on songs like 'A Little Bit Of Light Banter,' in which a couple pointedly refuses to talk about any difficult topical issues in favor of putting their heads down and not making a fuss. MAD! reflects a world that's out of alignment, filtered through an absurdist lens. It's everything you could want from a Sparks album. More from A.V. Club 3 new songs and 3 new albums to check out this weekend A zippy episode of Duster steps on Elvis' blue suede shoes Roy Wood Jr. says no one at The Daily Show could really explain the Hasan Minhaj controversy
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stereolab: Instant Holograms on Metal Film review – after 15 years, the retro-futurists make a radiant return
The first sound you hear on Stereolab's first new studio album in 15 years is a burst of arpeggiated synth tones. It sounds not unlike the once futuristic ident of a long-defunct TV channel. The first words you hear Lætita Sadier and backing vocalist Marie Merlet sing – their voices winding around each other in a sweet-but-sad melody, over the tight, mid-tempo rhythm of Aerial Troubles – are 'the numbing is not working any more / An unfillable hole, an insatiable state of consumption (systemic) / assigned trajectory (extortion).' To which, of course, the seasoned Stereolab fan might break into a contented smile of recognition and sigh 'mais naturellement'. A retro-futurist aesthetic; tight, hypnotic grooves derived from the motorik krautrock of Neu!; vintage synthesiser tones and vocals that entwine around each other; lyrics that take a dim Marxist/situationist-influenced view of modern life: this is very much what Stereolab spent the 90s and early 00s dealing in, during a career in which they occupied their own space slightly apart from everything else. They were a product of the low-rent London indie scene documented in former drummer Joe Dilworth's 2024 book Everything, All at Once Forever, but sounded nothing like any of its other participants. The closest they came to mainstream success – a couple of Top 20 albums, a lot of radio play for their 1994 single Ping Pong – was during the Britpop era, but they clearly had almost nothing in common with Britpop. Aspects of their sound or aesthetic chimed variously with post-rock, the easy listening revival, leftfield electronica, and the curious 90s midlands underground scene that begat Pram, Broadcast and Plone, but Stereolab never quite fitted with any of them. No one familiar with their back catalogue is going to play Instant Holograms on Metal Film and wonder aloud at who it's by. It's all very Stereolab, from the song titles – Colour Television, Electrified Teenybop! and Vermona F Transistor – to its sound, which is impressively eclectic without really shifting outside the admittedly wide-ranging palette of styles they deployed in their initial incarnation. Immortal Hands shifts from jazzy sunshine pop to drum-machine-driven funk; a hint of drum'n'bass lurks around the agitated rhythm of Transmuted Matter; the bouncy keyboard riff of Esemplastic Creeping Eruption seems to have been transplanted into the song from a lost 70s kids' show. Perhaps more importantly, anyone familiar with their back catalogue should be delighted to learn that Instant Holograms on Metal Film offers a very strong example of Stereolab doing what they do. The criticism that frequently dogged them was that there was something arid and dispassionate about their collaging of recherche musical influences and political theory: it was terribly clever rather than heartfelt. But for all Sadier's cool detachment, there's a warmth and brightness to the sound and the yé-yé and easy listening-derived melodies. The instrumental Electrified Teenybop! feels gleeful enough to deserve its exclamation mark; the flute-adorned Flashes from Everywhere is a breezy joy. It never sounds like people conducting an experiment so much as a reconvened band genuinely enjoying working together. Amid the album's references to the death of modernity and Deleuze and Guttari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, you could read the lyrics of Esemplastic Creeping Eruption, with their talk of 'reconciliations', leaving 'the realm of oppositions' and the 'bountiful tap' of creativity as being about nothing more complicated than reforming the band. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion There's something slightly strange about hearing the reconstituted Stereolab in 2025: for all that Instant Holograms on Metal Film harks back to the music they made 30 years ago, it feels weirdly current. Perhaps that's because they were always at one remove from everything else – it doesn't evoke a specific past era – or perhaps because Stereolab have exerted at least some influence over pop since their initial split, hailed as an inspiration by everyone from Deerhoof to Tyler, the Creator, the latter claiming 'they shaped my sound'. (There also exists a video online in which Pharrell Williams describes why their 1997 track The Flower Called Nowhere is the best music to be fellated to in dispiriting detail, but the less said about that the better.) Or perhaps it's because Sadier's lyrics feel less marginal or left-field than they once did. You really didn't get a lot of Marxist-influenced critiques of late-stage capitalism during Britpop: today, the notion that an addiction to growth might pose an existential threat to humanity has been mainstreamed. Likewise the rise of social media has made rather a lot of situationism's ideas about spectacle seem more pertinent than ever. 'The goal is to manipulate / Heavy hands to intimidate / Snuff out the very idea of clarity / Strangle your longing for truth and trust,' sings Sadier on Melodie Is a Wound. On the one hand, that's very much Stereolab being Stereolab. On the other: she can say that again. Parade – Picking Flowers Eerily atmospheric, occasionally discordant, ultimately rather beautiful, touching on post-rock, jazz and acoustic singer-songwriter modes along the way: a strange, and fascinating debut by the London band.
Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Stereolab: Instant Holograms on Metal Film review — delightful and original
Back in 1996 Stereolab were on the bill at the now defunct Phoenix festival, an unpleasant rock/dance/rap affair that took place on an airstrip near Stratford-upon-Avon. The sound and perhaps sight of three women and two men in Sixties modernist clothing playing polite electronic pop influenced by European arthouse cinema, brutalist architecture and Marxist politics appeared to offend the beery, thuggish crowd. They were there chiefly to wait for members of the hip-hop collective the Wu-Tang Clan to take to the stage. Stereolab managed to get through three songs, including their peerless classic French Disko, before giving in to the shower of bottles, cans and sexually loaded insults coming their way. It must be a sign of progress that since then, Stereolab have become one
