Mars Audiac Quintet

The sound is a long straight desert road. It’s a nursery rhyme that can bench press a city bus. It is a hundred-gallon jar of honey, a diamond-tipped jackhammer, a mouthful of pyrite Pop Rocks. Stereolab’s early records had toyed with all sorts of humble stuff—jangling guitars and poky home organs, French yé-yé and 1960s kitsch—but on 1994’s Mars Audiac Quintet, they achieved something closer to transubstantiation, converting familiar materials into something sublime.

What’s funny is that on paper, at least, they had barely altered their formula. As they had since the beginning, Stereolab drew liberally from Neu!’s monochord chug and motorik pulse, Suicide’s coruscating Farfisa buzz, and the Velvet Underground’s holy modal drone, topping it all with sweet, sing-song vocal harmonies descended straight from ’60s bubblegum pop. But on Mars Audiac Quintet, those materials came together in a synesthete’s dream, a perfect merger of color and heft—a sound so chunky, so tangible, you could practically feel it in the palm of your hand.

Stereolab—the brain trust of Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier, surrounded by a fluctuating cast of collaborators (on Mars Audiac Quintet, they were actually a sextet assisted by a handful of studio musicians)—had surfed into the popular consciousness atop the easy-listening revival’s cresting wave. Their first few EPs and debut LP, Peng!, infused overdriven indie pop with mid-century camp and moon-shot optimism; by 1996’s John McEntire-produced Emperor Tomato Ketchup, they would begin pushing into new frontiers, twisting their sound into odd time signatures and exploring increasingly intricate arrangements. Dots and Loops, widely considered their masterpiece, is the pinnacle of their mature phase; when most people think of Stereolab, that record’s kinks and quirks are probably what first come to mind. Mars Audiac Quintet marked the end of their early years, the triumphant capstone to the run of albums stretching through Peng!, the singles comp Switched On, and Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements. Mars Audiac Quintet is the hardest-rocking music Stereolab ever set to tape; it is the closest they ever came to replicating the jet-engine roar of their live shows.

It is also their most hypnotic record, and there is no contradiction in that. Like Neu! and the Velvets before them, Stereolab taught a new generation the power of hammering away at the same chord until sparks flew and stones bled. “We’re about repetition, a riff, a chord, two or three notes going round and round,” Gane told Melody Maker in 1991. The goal, said Sadier, was “the trance.” On Mars Audiac Quintet, they drop straight into it, like a hypnotist snapping his fingers; the zone-out is practically instantaneous. “Three-Dee Melodie” is just three chords, one-note bassline, and methodical drumbeat; the voices of Sadier and Mary Hansen—the group’s second vocalist from 1992 until 2002, when she was killed cycling in London—circle each other in graceful counterpoint. Yet within those tight quarters, something like infinity opens up.

Stereolab had been playing with similar ideas for a while; on the Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements centerpiece “Jenny Ondioline,” they had drawn out their trance-inducing churn into 18 minutes of cotton-candy oblivion. But there’s something newly enveloping about the sound of “Three-Dee Melodie,” and the rest of Mars Audiac Quintet, that stands apart. Those bright, buzzing organs and Moogs, with their endless stacks of overtones, loom like gleaming skyscrapers; Andy Ramsay’s drum fills map a labyrinthine path atop the linear groove, a succession of trap doors and detours that always lead back into that endless tunnel.

The structure of the album is itself often maze-like; for all the captivating stasis of their most repetitive songs, they are also fond of sideways feints. The Neu!-inspired “Nihilist Assault Group” lays down four minutes of metronomic pulse and shimmer, stumbles across a false ending of gurgling oscillators, and then slips back into a groove that sounds nearly identical to the original—just ever so slightly different, as though you’d been abducted by aliens and deposited in an almost perfect simulation. Something similar happens on “Outer Accelerator,” another kraut-like standout, as the song abruptly fades into a wah-wah-streaked freakout jam unrelated to what preceded it, but complementary nonetheless. (Yo La Tengo fans may recognize the bassline here for its reappearance in Yo La Tengo’s “Moby Octopad”; given that the two bands toured together in 1995, it’s not hard to imagine that the latter song is an homage to the former.)

In liner notes to Mars Audiac Quintet’s recent remasters, Gane says that the original idea for the album was for every track to have exactly the same, barely modulating three-chord shape—“actually a single chord with two finger movements on top”—though the idea ran out of steam after five songs. Still, they got plenty of mileage out of it. “Transona Five” lumbers like one of T. Rex’s glam-rock stompers, while the Steve Reich-inspired “Anamorphose” puts Sean O’Hagan’s horn arrangements to spellbinding use, spinning off counterpoint after counterpoint and conjuring the interlocking gears of a perpetual motion machine.

Many of the album’s best songs—“Wow and Flutter,” “Anamorphose,” “Nihilist Assault Group,” “Outer Accelerator”—capture this sort of energy, stamping out recurring patterns with near-industrial precision. (Perhaps it’s not surprising that Gane was a Throbbing Gristle fan; rather than that group’s smokestacks and death camps, though, Stereolab’s Technicolor vision of heavy industry hews closer to the fanciful machinery of Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory.) What Stereolab held in common with their post-rock peers was the subversion of rock’s traditional hierarchies: The guitar is demoted from its usual lead role and relegated to texture and timekeeping; Moog and Farfisa ooze to the foreground, not so much hogging the spotlight as flooding the whole damn stage; the bass, pushed high in the mix, is less part of the rhythm section than a kind of thickening agent to hold it all together.

Even Sadier’s lead vocals resist sounding like rock vocals. If the rock canon imagines its singers as heroic figures, their voices like torches leading bravely onward, Sadier refused to play that role; her high, cool voice is more like a light rising from within her bandmates’ protective exoskeleton, suffusing it all in soft glow. Twinned with Hansen’s often wordless la-di-das, her singing was frequently all but indecipherable. The liberties she took with phrasing (singing “Need to examine/Uncritical times,” she stressed the final syllable of “examine” and drew out a long “i” sound to rhyme with “time”) could leave listeners without a lyric sheet adrift. But her Marxist critique is as trenchant as ever on Mars Audiac Quintet, and every now and then a refrain will float to the surface (“We can’t avoid dying”), a lullaby to raise the hairs on your neck.

In a voice about as threatening as strawberry milk, Sadier sings of military inscription, moral panics, censorship, autocracy; many of her songs seem even more timely now than they did then. “Transporte Sans Bouger” is a prescient look at the psychic damage wreaked by the internet, long before anyone had dreamed of social media; “Outer Accelerator” is directly applicable to the sorry state of representative democracy in 2019. And “Ping Pong” is as perfect a pop song about capitalism and the military-industrial complex that you will ever hear, with a refrain so catchy it can inspire the unlikeliest of singalongs:

Bigger slump and bigger wars
And a smaller recovery
Huger slump and greater wars
And a shallower recovery

A quarter-century later, Stereolab’s fatalistic protest music looks to have been remarkably on the nose. But what Mars Audiac Quintet offered was more important than a simple political program. It made good on the promise of alternative music in unusually physical terms, using repetition and volume as architectural tools to construct songs that doubled as a kind of refuge. The title “Transporte Sans Bouger” translates as “Traveling Without Moving,” and in the context of the song, it refers to the disquieting specter of telepresence, to a “sickness of the senses” where no one knows their neighbor and loneliness is a pandemic. You don’t need to be extremely online to feel the familiar force of that observation today, when there are millions more people online than in 1994. (In the crushing isolation sweepstakes, the people of the Bill Clinton/John Major years had it relatively easy.) But Stereolab’s first landmark album facilitates another kind of traveling without moving: a whirlwind sound that could—and still can, and does—wrap you up and carry you away.

Buy: Rough Trade

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