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Since ditching the kraut-styled drone-and-hum zone-outs for fluttery Brazilification and po-faced post-rock-isms, Stereolab have attracted much criticism for making emotionless, humorless, sexless music. Blessed with a Kraftwerk-inspired stand-and-deliver ethos, the group has become more and more ornate in its recent recorded output. On their eighth album, Sound-Dust, Stereolab take the next logical step down their path of continued forward progression. Just as Jason Pierce has removed the sounds from Let It Come Down that he found immediately identifiable as Spiritualized — phase, delay, Farfisa — so too do Stereolab on Sound-Dust, the album being almost entirely free of the burbling, gurgling analog keyboards that previously defined the band's sound. Keyboard instruments remain, but baroque and percussive instead of retro and droning, with piano, Rhodes, and harpsichord all on hand. Continuing an audio development from Dots and Loops, Sound-Dust is littered with a giddy array of hand percussion instruments — marimba, vibraphone and glockenspiel stir up a polyrhythmic stew, its busyness and complexity sounding like the product of painstaking studio assemblage. Helping out are John McEntire, Jim O'Rourke, and Sean O'Hagan, all of whom have, themselves, been accused of making overly ornate, distant and unfeeling music. Stereolab also get some help with woodwind arrangements by Brian Wilson associate Paul Mertens. In all its sonic complexities, Sound-Dust is a restless affair. A song like "Space Moth" suggests the album's dizzying, ever-shifting scope as it moves from harpsichord-fluttering, flute-draped, minor-key, Polanski-film-soundtracking orchestrations, through overlapping polyrhythmic tumblings of beats and drums and organ, to a sun-shining '70s-pop blowout awash in O'Rourkian orchestrations.
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