Music Banter

This is just a repost of something found on Pitchfork, but it’s a reason to be cheerful, anyway. Stereolab were one of the most unusual and often impenetrable bands of the mid-nineties- if you put some of their music on for a friend, you’d either get a reaction of total bafflement or utter love. motoric Krautrock beats, weird analogue keyboards making the kind of thing robots would do if you told them to make lounge music (as opposed to Daft Punk, which is what robots would do if you told them to make disco music), and serene gallic-toned harmonies with lyrics which contained such gems as ‘originally the institutions were set up to serve society, now society serves the institutions.’ On the quiet, they were like the Manics, chucking provocative Marxist rhetoric into (sort of) pop music, and rendering it indecipherable as they did so. They were awesome.

They’ve been ploughing their own particular furrow for what seems like forever now, and announced recently that enough was enough, at least for the time being (although frontwoman Letitia Sadler will be putting out more solo stuff soon).

Luckily, however, there is still some new music to look forward to. with a new album called ‘Not Music’ coming out on Drag City records on the 16th of November.

Fantastic. I’m imagining it’ll be as charming, quirky and impenetrable as the band I’ve come to know and love over the years. I also hope it’s not the end for them- it’s harder and harder for bands to sustain themselves, and some bands really shouldn’t. Stereolab have managed to settle into that comfortable territory between ‘groundbreaking/unique’ and ‘instantly themselves no matter what record of theirs you put on’ that, say, Sonic Youth have also managed. It’s hard to know when diminishing returns set in, and I’m hoping that maybe this will just be a fallow period which allows them to return refreshed and invigorated.

In the mean time, here’s a reminder of exactly what got us interested in them in the first place:

I love band names. They’re endlessly amusing, some because of the unique way they sum up that particular band’s sound or ethos, some because they really don’t. It can take a band AGES to choose a name. There’s a lot of ways to go about it.

First things first, don’t go for a joke. I’m a fan of the weird, and the polysyllabic, the sort of name it would have taken John Peel some time to get right on his radio show, but let’s be fair, a terrible name can make you into a joke. I’m talking Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts, Shellsuit Massacre, Pestilent Stench, Do Make Say Think, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, the Virgin Prunes, maybeshewill, Doctor Collossus and the Fifty-Foot Spider Monkeys, Helpshecan’tswim, and a thousand others who all live in my memory for their names, not their music.

Some bands just aim for something that sounds good but doesn’t mean anything, much in the way that a multinational corporation will choose a jumble of randomly chosen consonants and vowels, in an attempt to ‘brand’ the music. U2 is a good example. It means something, sort of, but it’s more just an empty label, a blank signifier which can be whatever you want it to mean. Here’s a few more examples. The Who. ABBA. Coldplay (seriously, who could believe for a minute that that meant anything?). Snow Patrol.

Bit of a theme developing there, one might think. But the indie kids are at it too, have been for years- Kyuss, Nitzer Ebb and Pulp are all deliberately empty names, and more recently bands like Interpol, Bat For Lashes, and Elbow have deliberately eschewed meaning in favour of a name that just… sounds good. My favorite band name of all, however, is Husker Du, which apparently is Norwegian for ‘Do You remember?’-doesn’t that instantly create an air of yearning, of mystery?

Others just go for one-word statements of intent. Metallica, Stereolab, Mogwai. Wolfmother. R.E.M. You read those names, you know what you’re getting, or at least get some kind of hint. That’s a good way to do it, setting your stall out, letting people know what you’re about. They don’t tell the whole story, though. At the end of the day, a name should not be the most interesting thing about your band. If it is, you’re doing it wrong.

Here’s a final thought- sometimes a band name doesn’t matter. Imagine a young band, known for good live shows, playing a recognizable and well-defined form of music, choosing a name which is a pun on their chosen genre. They’re going to be terrible, right?

Well, that would be the Beatles.