I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: STEREOLAB: “So is Cardboard Clouds” (2010).

I’ve been listening to Stereolab for something like 15 years now.  They are definitely a “have to been in the mood” kind of band.  Their music is a blend of electronica, especially krautrock, but with an Esquivel/bachelor pad twist.  And, of course half of the songs are sung in French (and are often about politics).

Aside from a few stylistic decisions over the years, the band hasn’t changed very much in style (or substance).  And yet, each new disc is a cause for curiosity.  Will it be long and meandering electronic booping music or short and catchy electronic booping music.

NPR had a preview of their new CD Not Music until basically the day before I clicked on the link (I must subscribe to these new release streams).  But I was able to listen to a couple of songs.  The first I chose was “So is Cardboard Clouds”.

It’s almost four minutes and opens simply and quietly with a repeated motif under Laetitia Sadier’s vocals.  (One of the fun things about Stereolab is never knowing if Laetitia is singing in French or English.  Her enunciation of English words is so peculiar that it’s not always evident that she’s actually speaking/singing English until you read the liner notes.

At about the two-minute mark, the song jumps into a far more rocking style.  It sounds like horn blasts repeated over and over at a fairly fast clip.  And this sets the tone for the speedier second half of the song.  Then the rocking part and the bubbly beats merge until the end which is all instrumental.

Musically, there’s nothing as much fun as a song that catches you off guard, and the tone shift one certainly does.  Even after a couple of listens, that switch to the faster section comes as a surprise.  Each parts of the song highlights the different aspects of  Stereolab’s styles and they’re throwing in enough newness to keep it interesting.

[READ: November 14, 2010] “Rangoon Green”

I’ve never heard of Barry Hannah before; he evidently died in March.  This story will come from his final collection of stories.  And I wanted to like it.  I really did.

The epigram was quite enticing: “Rangoon Green, trophy holder third place in the national storyteller telloff.  Murfreesboro, Tennessee 2011”

The story then begins with Rangoon himself telling how pissed he is that he came in third.  Again.  Obviously, he explains, the first place winner slept with a judge and the second place winner was a local so of course there was cheating there.

I was really getting into this idea of a storyteller telling a story about losing a storytelling contest.  But then it want pear- shaped, with talk of arson and fireworks and all kinds of things and man it went on for a long time.

There were a lot of things I liked about the story.  I liked that the character had been scarred by acne as a child and was half-disfigured and half-normal looking and that he used this to his advantage.  When he wanted to scare people he showed them the disfigured side, but when he was trying to schmooze, hello normal side.  I even enjoyed the rambling aspect when he goes off on not learning about the Vitamin A treatment which could have cleared up his skin until it was too late.

But then there was all that stuff about firebugs and bombs and licking women and I couldn’t figure out how it all tied together.  Was the narrator schizophrenic or just nuts or lying and how many other people were implicated and I just kind of gave up on caring.  I even considered not finishing the story, but I thought maybe it would follow some kind of circuitous route towards getting back to the storytelling contest and tying those odd threads together.  But it never did.  And my interest died long before the final weird sentence.