Stereolab
Chemical Chords

Cover art for Chemical Chords by Stereolab Description: 2LP on 4AD
Format: Double LP (vinyl)
Genre(s): Experimental Indie
Label: 4AD
Price:
£13.19
Availability: Sold out / currently unavailable. Sorry!

4Rating: 4
...according to our on 14 August 2008.

Was listening to Stereolab's latest album 'Chemical Chords' and failed to entertain me. It's weird seeing them on 4AD like. As well as the double vinyl LP there is a limited edition Japanese edition of the CD available with extra tracks and in a mini gatefold sleeve an obi strip. I used to like Stereolab but I'm not into their recent material as much. It just feels to me like a diluted duller take on what they did really well years ago. It's not a bad record by any means and I suspect it could be a bit of a grower... Far more entertaining though was my trip out for lunch where I saw some doilum licking the screen of his mobile phone to clean it. (There is the possibility however that he had some special flavoured phone in which case the joke is on me.)

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What their label says...

If you discount ‘Fab Four Suture’, the EP collection of 2006, ‘Chemical Chords’ is the first album proper from Stereolab since 2004’s ‘Margerine Eclipse’.
The eleventh album in an illustrious career, ‘Chemical Chords’ began life in early 2007 when Tim Gane started messing with “a series of about seventy tiny drum loops” on top of improvised chord sequences using piano and vibraphone, “building them up from there – later slowing the tracks down or speeding them up – a totally new way of doing songs for us…”
With typical prolificacy, the band laboured over the summer at their studio, Instant Zero (in Bordeaux, France), helping transform these blueprints into 32 luminous new songs, with keyboardist / technician Joe Watson manning the mixing desk. Half the new repertoire was selected for this album, which, for all the breathless spontaneity of its invention, is arguably the band’s tautest, most highly focused work this century.
‘Chemical Chords’ is available as a special limited Japanese edition (2500 copies), in mini gatefold sleeve with obi strip and two extra tracks, plus standard CD and vinyl.
Neon Beanbag
Three Women
One Finger Symphony
Chemical Chords
The Ecstatic Static
Valley Hi!
Silver Sands
Pop Molecule (Molecular Pop 1)
Self Portrait With ‘Electric Brain’
Nous Vous Demandons Pardon    Nous Vous Demandons Pardon
Cellulose Sunshine
Fractal Dream Of A Thing
Daisy Click Clack
Vortical Phonotheque
The Nth Degree *
Magne-Music *
* = CADD2815D only