Pity the cerebral technicians of Stereolab, whose coolly subversive fusion of Muzak and kraut rock has for too long condemned them to the critics'-darling ghetto. Perfect postmodern-pop group though Stereolab may be, I'll wager that they would trade a smidgen of street cred for a moment in the bigger spotlight.

If Dots and Loops doesn't raise Stereolab's profile, it won't be because the album is an unworthy follow-up to last year's feted Emperor Tomato Ketchup. What the band and producer John McEntire began with Ketchup has been beautifully built upon here. The group is moving ever further away from the one-chord drone mesh of its early days and toward the avant-easy listening of its chums in the High Llamas, whose leadman, Sean O'Hagan, contributes keyboard parts and spirited horn and string arrangements to this album.

Hypnotic repetition is still Stereolab's main mode, but Dots and Loops fleshes out its rhythms with a range of infectious hybridizations. "Ticker-tape of the Unconscious" lays trancey vibes and brass over Stevie Wonder funk, while "The Flower Called Nowhere" – one of three tracks here produced by German technoids Mouse on Mars – weds a John Barry harpsichord riff with a cosmic MOR melody. The four-part, 17-minute "Refractions in the Plastic Pulse" starts like a track from the Llamas' Hawaii – all murky vibes, flat Farfisa pads, bossa-nova guitar and Brian Wilson bass – before revisiting Laetitia Sadier's trustiest Nico-isms and then plunging into a synth passage that seems to hail from Todd Rundgren's 1973 album A Wizard/A True Star. Amazing stuff.

It's time that this Marxist Europop collective broke out of cultville. Stereolab's early song title "John Cage Bubblegum" may still serve as neat shorthand for what they do, but on Dots and Loops they do it with enough panache and inventiveness to leave the aforementioned ghetto firmly behind them. (RS 770)

BARNEY HOSKYNS