Stereo Total
Paris-Berlin
(Kill Rock Stars)
Stereo Total is the French/German duo of Françoise Cactus and
Brezel Göring. She’s a little bit
ye-ye, he’s a little bit diskothek. Stereo Total
is their international make-out session. And Paris-Berlin is
Stereo Total at their best.
With their eighth album, Stereo Total bring the latent radicalism of
their borderless free love to the surface, striking revolutionary poses
in song and in the album’s socialist agit-prop artwork. “Baby
Revolution” (cowritten by radical gay filmmaker/author Bruce LaBruce)
is a love letter/manifesto full of sweet slogans: “There will be no
revolution/without sexual revolution,” “The bed is the last
barricade/of bourgeois life,” “Put your Marxism/where your mouth is,”
and so on. The gushing anthem “Patty Hearst” paints its subject as a
willing situationist savior. “Komplex Mit Dem Sex” is a cool bossa nova
ode to gender transgression.
If all this sounds a little too theoretical, don’t worry. Stereo
Total’s mix of punk, new wave, electro, mod, and ye-ye pop is fun and
sexy enough to make for some pretty satisfying praxis.
“Komplex Mit Dem Sex” has more than a hint of Serge Gainsbourg to
it, as does the breezy funk of “Ta Voix Au Téléphone.”
Conversely, the band’s Gainsbourg cover, “Relax Baby Be Cool,” opts for
nervous rock ‘n’ roll boogie rather than Gauloises-smoking mod cool.
“Lolita Fantôme” combines the duo’s breathy singing with
descending chords, bouncing xylophone, and a Timbaland-worthy baby
squeal. The duo alternately sing in French, German, English, and other
languages, but myriad tongues are hardly a problem. Enough words
translate for songs like “Komplex Mit Dem Sex” or “Baisers de l’Enfer
de la Musique” to make some rough sense, and songs like “Lolita
Fantôme” and “Ta Voix Au Téléphone” may actually
benefit from some misunderstanding—their sad subjects sound light
and romantic without the proper translation. ERIC GRANDY
Stereo Total play Mon Sept 3 at Chop Suey, with the Octopus
Project, Welcome, 8 pm, $10, all ages.
Panacea
The Scenic Route
(Glow-in-the-Dark)
The music of Washington, D.C., hiphop duo Panacea is almost achingly
soft—quiet storm, yacht-rock soft. Producer K-Murdock’s tracks on
The Scenic Route, the group’s second full-length album, seem
to float in the air instead of bump out of the speakers. Other
producers have crafted recordings that sound like the hiphop equivalent
of notorious ’80s ambient-jazz imprint Windham Hill. K-Murdock deserves
special mention, however, for not only making incredibly smooth music,
but heightening its angelic, otherworldly quality with eerie fade-outs
and strange treble effects. “Pops Said,” for example, ends with an
ambient freak-out worthy of a Boards of Canada album.
But K-Murdock’s beats tend to overshadow Raw Poetic’s lyrical
performance. While not a bad rapper, he lacks a distinct voice, and his
cool, even tones tend to get lost amid the lushness of K-Murdock’s
tracks. Most of Raw Poetic’s rhymes seem to focus on personal journey
and discovery: On “Bubble,” he dreams of drifting underwater and
floating in a bubble. “Please splash to the crew y’all/Flashback to
backpacks and schoolyards,” he raps. Other themes, such as that of the
love song “Katana,” employ less imagery. K-Murdock tries to craft a few
downtempo Blue Note tracks, like “Walk in the Park,” to demonstrate
some sonic diversity, but for the most part, Panacea’s gauzy songs
sound all too similar and blend into one another. Still, The Scenic
Route is dreamy and atmospheric, the sonic equivalent of a
listless Sunday afternoon drive. MOSI REEVES
Deer Tick
War Elephant
(Feow!)
For a young man, John McCauley has an old voice. It’s a voice that
would sound best backed by the crackle of old vinyl and the hiss of the
ancient, fabric-covered speakers sitting in the corner of your
grandmother’s attic.
War Elephant, the first album from McCauley’s solo project
Deer Tick, takes listeners on a voyage back 75 years to the forlorn and
dust-driven days of the Great Depression. McCauley tackles the big
subjects—love lost and given up, the lonesome American road,
death and rebirth, faith—with a sense of gravity and bittersweet
humor impressive in someone who’s just reached the far side of 20.
The instrumentation on War Elephant is sparse but vibrant;
McCauley plays a shambling acoustic guitar that oscillates in tempo
between funeral march (“Sink or Swim”) and saunter (“Baltimore Blues
No. 1″) punctuated by shuffling drums and cathartic swells.
McCauley shines when talking about the vagaries of love. He tries to
let a lover down easy in the wistful “Dirty Dishes,” which ends with a
dose of rough comfort: “You wanted more and you got less, and it
hurt/But it could be worse, yeah/Things could be so much worse.” In
“Nevada,” he’s the one on the wrong side of love, realizing, “you’ll
always leave me crushed.”
The centerpiece of each song is McCauley’s rough-edged voice, which
traverses the sepia-toned landscape of War Elephant, ascending
its gritty peaks and following heartbreak down to its lonesome valleys.
He sounds like he’s channeling some troubled ghost from the past, and
it’s only on the last song of the album (the melancholy cover of “What
Kind of Fool Am I?”) that McCauley’s unsettled spirit seems to finally
get some rest. CHRIS McCANN
RZA
GZA
Meth
ODB