Stereolab
Jenny Ondioline EP

LA RECENSIONE

Lots of groundwork with the initial experimental EPs to then manage to get noticed by the public. A necessary thing. But not because success is essential.

In the end, making music is the most generous gesture. Melodies are explained for others. If they hadn't flashed to produce "Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements," we wouldn't have filtered another masterpiece in our minds.

Playing is a very delicate "thing."

You can devastate, upset, horrify, or enchant another living being, even a labrador or a very fluffy Persian cat on a lazier sofa than itself.

Stereolab is a mix of genius, madness, irony, and abstractionism. Yes, because you can't approach their sound so easily. A certain culture is needed; otherwise, it's all null. They might even seem "friendly" to you (and already, anyone who uses this hasty term shows poor preparation), but if you don't know Neu, Suicide, Soft Machine, and Sonic Youth, you're missing the foundation.

So in their conception, three decades are understood. To put it briefly, it colors a "Sister Ray" even more than Reed and friends did. It really becomes a kaleidoscope with "Jenny Ondioline." Oops...I've already said too much, but well...it's the beauty of live broadcasting. There are no fictions; it's all true, but it's even more intangible than shoegaze.

After the cornerstone of "Transient..." there's the risk of getting lost, though. And they managed it, but perhaps that's the true glory. In the next two works, they were quite disoriented and mixed, to then obviously vanish.

The zenith is in 1993.

Sadier plays the part of Nico from the Velvet (a perpetually ethereal and anesthetized singing...we're not at slowcore levels, though, eh). Hers is a lullaby sweetened with a hallucinatory sedative, while the guitars are colored drones always on loop.

All this is what you find in "Jenny Ondioline" and its EP. In the album, it's a twenty-minute journey, but here instead, it's three minutes of happy masochistic bewilderment. Our soul is nourished with caresses and neurotic jolts, as in "French Disco." The classic engaging verse of the girl and the watts rising in the bridges. There is also "Golden Ball," where during the course of the track, we think at least twice that another song has intruded as Stereolab's background (but only if we haven't heard "Transient...," since it's part of that album). The shock is the crazy tempo changes of this kraut mantra, of this band that disappeared too soon.