Monade
Socialisme Ou Barbarie The Bedroom Recordings

LA RECENSIONE

It's always nice to walk into a record store and see that in the used section for 5 euros you can find the elusive debut album by Laetitia Sadier.
The side project is called Monade and, in reality, there's a lot of the good old stereo lab inside...
Socialisme ou Barbarie The Bedroom Recordings (the girl wants us to know she's well-read, but we already knew that!) is the Stereolab album that many were waiting for, an album of melodies, songs without psychedelic lengths. No! Nooo!!! Don't hit me... not all at once, please!!!

Wheeew... how many of us are left? Ok, I’ll continue now.
The tracks actually all last less than 5 minutes and are sung by Laetitia. They are always very tied to modernized sixties melodies and the suspended atmospheres that the Anglo-French group was the first to bring back to the fore now a decade ago.
The album, at a first listen, a bit monotonous, actually encloses some little musical delicacies like "Un Secret Sans Importance," a simple nocturnal blues (surely stolen from some old black man down there in Mississippi) filled with keyboard layers, "Witch Hazel" intoxicates you with cellos but ends before you can capture it, "Vol De Jour" is the ideal soundtrack for a forced distant goodbye scene between lovers with too much to say and too many prying eyes who must not know. "Vent Du Sud" is perhaps the track most suitable for a dance remix thanks also to that electronic beat and the little guitar riff that makes (or would make) it the hypothetical stereolabbed cover of a Manu Chao song.
The most cinematic track (and here the threatening shadow of the crime genre looms) is "Ode To Keyring" where it’s easy to imagine this soundscape as the ideal accompaniment for the exit scene of the antihero detective with his worn-out trench coat... turns the corner far away now and... fade to black.
Therefore, an album not to give away as used, and I'm sorry to return to the unbelievable stroke of luck I had, provided you don't feel like benefactors of humanity and want to dispose of something precious to give it to someone you don't know.