Stereolab: Fab Four Suture : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Stereolab are the art-pop equivalent of Busta Rhymes -- i.e., Nineties luminaries who've been coasting for a while now. Their tenth album adds six new songs to six singles released last year, but for the most part, Fab Four Suture is just another plush collage of technicolor lounge balladry, cheesy Eurojazz and Laetitia Sadier's chanteuse-y politico observations, with the gurgly keyboards pulling more weight than the half-baked tunes. Where Stereolab once made brainy easy-listening with a strong pleasure principle, Suture often just vagues out: "Eye of the Volcano" strings together eerie psych rock, skittery disco and barely intelligible cooing about the bourgeois with the scarcest of hooks, and "Kyberneticka Babicka Part 1" is an organ-fueled reverie that bubbles over for four and a half minutes. Brighter cuts like "Whisper Pitch" are entrancing in a Magic Eye kind of way, and "Interlock" works up suave funk; but even longtime fans will have to wonder what the point is.