Album: Emperor Tomato Ketchup
Year: 1996
. . .
1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup definitely showed off a new approach for Stereolab: while they were still interested in trance-inducing music, they were also interested in creating it through more artificial means, using the studio as more of an instrument than they had previously.
All of that is immediately apparent in the opening track, “Metronomic Underground,” one of those song titles that perfectly describes the song itself.
Starting with a martial drumbeat that could be a loop, a wah-wah guitar, a funky-adjacent bassline and swirling keyboards, “Metronomic Underground” sets its mood long before Lætitia Sadier (unless it’s Mary Hansen) starts singing. And her words just become part of that mood.
Crazy, sturdy, a torpedo
Crazy, sturdy, a torpedo
Crazy, sturdy, a torpedo
Crazy, sturdy, a torpedo
Crazy, brutal, a torpedo
Crazy, sturdy, a torpedo
It’s all in the pronunciation, of course: “Cray-zeee / Stur-deee / A-tor / Pee-doh” over and over and over. Eventually Mary Hansen (unless it’s Lætitia Sadier) comes in with some murmured counterpoint vocals — sometimes singing words, and sometimes singing the bassline — but nothing that’s going break the mood or drone that goes on for nearly eight minutes. Utterly hypnotic, but in a totally different way than their previously hypnotic songs.
“Metronomic Underground” was released as a single in the U.K., and unlike the other singles they released in the mid-1990s, failed to chart at all. (Not that any of them even cracked the U.K. top 40.)
After that, I lost the plot: I didn’t like 1997’s Dots and Loops and can’t remember anything from 1999’s Cobra and Phases Play Voltage in the Milky Night despite the excellent album title. The only one of their 2000s albums I checked out was 2009’s Chemical Chords, but nothing jumped out at me from that one either.
“Metronomic Underground”
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