Black ants & space months

I was really big on Stereolab at first: loved the thick keyboard whooshes, the autobahn rhythms, the blend of disparate collector-geek influences into one purposeful sound. Was all over their first few records, saw them live a couple times and dug them, etc. And then I basically lost interest. In their struggle to differentiate one album from the next, they seemed to get lighter & lighter, more abstracted, fussier. (Plus I figured I’d heard enough ba-ba-ba.) There just didn’t seem to be much need to check out Latest Stereolab Album X instead of sticking with the ones I already had.

Recently, though, I watched a documentary about Robert Moog that included some live Stereolab footage, and that revived some of my long-ago excitement. Lately I’ve been digging out some of their more “recent” stuff (by which I mean from over the past decade or so), wondering how much I’ve missed out.

Still listening & still deciding – I think I’m a long way away from being a full-on convert or anything – but a couple tracks that have jumped out so far are the two openers on their 2001 record, Sound-Dust. “Black Ants” is a little snatch of a song, and it could easily & perhaps fairly be dismissed as sci-fi kitsch, but to me it has a genuinely unsettling vibe that you don’t hear much in Stereolab. “Space Moth” is a multiparter: I find the intro spindly & skippable and the middle section solid if unspectacular. But things really get going a little past the five-minute mark, when the bass discovers some swing and the horns chip in with some accents.

• Stereolab, “Black Ants in Sound-Dust” and “Space Moth” (buy Sound-Dust here)