Cobra and phases group play voltage in the milky night.

Stere­o­lab’s per­for­mance Mon­day night proved that the lega­cy of dreamy, intel­li­gent and polit­i­cal music dies with them. I can think of few oth­er artists that com­bine lounge sen­si­bil­i­ties with shoegaze noise in ways that so eas­i­ly lend them­selves as new sound­track mate­r­i­al for Bertoluc­ci’s The Con­formist. If this tour and com­pi­la­tion prove their swan song, it would be a strange end for a polit­i­cal band exist­ing in decid­ed­ly apo­lit­i­cal times.

The last time I saw Stere­o­lab, it was about six years ago. They opened for Son­ic Youth on their NYC Ghosts & Flow­ers tour. Brim­ming with con­fi­dence, they shook the room with mon­ster truck dance music. The band was larg­er then, and with Mary Hansen, the har­monies sweet­er. Dense and cacoph­o­nous, the groop filled the room with sound, some­thing that Son­ic Youth’s spars­er mate­r­i­al could­n’t accom­plish. But Mon­day night, Stere­o­lab seemed to suf­fer the same fate of dimin­ish­ing returns.

As min­i­mal as pos­si­ble, the songs seemed thin when com­pared to their pre­vi­ous incar­na­tions. Stripped of their mul­ti-lay­ered com­plex­i­ty, the bare motorik chugged along while Laeti­tia Sadier’s faint voice got lost in the mix. By the time they reached “Cybele’s Rever­ie”, it was evi­dent what had been lost. Although they main­tain their inim­itable groove, with­out the synth appa­ra­tus and shoegaze as soundsys­tem sen­si­bil­i­ty, they’re an aging caberet act play­ing a nos­tal­gia cir­cuit. Despite what seemed a promis­ing return to form by re-invent­ing them­selves as a sin­gles ori­ent­ed band in a potent psy­che­del­ic scene fueled by polit­i­cal uncer­tain­ty, this tour may prove Stereolab’s belea­guered demise.