Laetitia Sadier - Silencio Review

One term that’s been thrown around to excess in reference to Stereolab is “background music”, although admittedly, whether it’s a dinner party or a study marathon, the band’s discography always delivers in this regard. While their breezy pop approach to krautrock does work remarkably well as the soundtrack to a variety of occasions, Stereolab consistently offered rewards for the more attentive listener — until the band on indefinite hiatus in 2009. Just like her work with Stereolab, frontwoman Laetitia Sadier continues to reflect that signature style on her second solo album, Silencio.


Such a distinctive sound comes with certain risks, like how variety and even evolution are overshadowed by uniformity, and the phenomenon of expecting the expected. Take “Next Time You See Me”, for example. Even if the track didn’t feature former Stereolab keyboardist Tim Gane, it would still harken back to that cool, loungey style featuring Sadier’s inimitable subdued intonations. What’s most noticeably new on Silencio is the shift away from motorik beats towards something more tropical. On “Find Me the Pulse of the Universe”, this rhythmic enrichment comes in the form of a samba undercurrent that brings a spark of humanity to the otherwise mathematical musings, while “Fragment Pour le Future de L’homme” is downright funky....full text Angry music generally sounds… well, angry. But perhaps that’s not the most useful way for protest to be expressed. Maybe it would be more welcoming and inspiring to a greater number of oppressed people if politicised anger sounded like beauty, sex and love. If you think this is an idea worth pursuing, then Lætitia Sadier is your best choice as leaderene.

It’s 22 years since Parisian Sadier formed Stereolab with her then-boyfriend and former McCarthy member Tim Gane. The ‘Lab came up with a precise, visionary idea: socialist song, performed in a style heavily informed by Françoise Hardy, Serge Gainsbourg, Neu!, classic bossa nova and The Velvet Underground. The results were presented like late-60s easy listening and library records, called things like The Groop Played “Space Age Bachelor Pad Music”. Within them, Sadier would purr elegant deconstructions of capitalist economic evils in a voice that sounded like snogging Audrey Hepburn while occupying The Sorbonne.

Sadier’s first solo album, The Trip, was released in 2010; and now comes this second album, which numbers Gane among its musicians. Silencio pulls off the baffling trick of sounding almost exactly like Stereolab while simultaneously making the entire aesthetic feel fresh and new all over again....full text The solo debut by a singer strongly identified with a band can say a lot about what the singer doesn’t like about the band, and so it was with Laetitia Sadier’s The Trip. Away from Stereolab she discovered a gift for concision, often a very good thing in pop music. She also foregrounded an emotional transparency that tended to be obscured by Stereolab’s polished surfaces, knowing genre references, and extended instrumental passages. The title song deftly expressed the complex feelings of surviving a sister’s suicide; putting a dreamy Euro-disco cover of Les Rita Mitsouko’s “Un Soir, Un Chien” on the same record made the loss sadder, the sweetness in bitter-sweet perseverance more pronounced. Moments like those were enough to make up for the fact that it was a 30-minute album with filler, which came in the form of clunky ballads.


But Sadier’s always been a political artist, and nothing snaps you out of yourself quite like having the world’s economy turn belly up. She’s been critiquing capitalism from a platform of vintage grooves for two decades now, and if you’ve been waiting for a follow-up to “Ping Pong,” she’s at your service with “Auscultation to the Nation,” which contains the recurring line “Rating agencies, financial markets, and the G20.” There’s even an analogue synth interlude courtesy of Sam Prekop to make up for Tim Gane’s absence behind the knobs. If the Occupy Movement has a chanteuse-in-waiting, it’s Sadier....full text