LAETITIA SADIER AND SOLEY STEFANSDOTTIR

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

The alluring avant-pop of Iceland's Sóley Stefánsdóttir and French songstress Laetitia Sadier

By: MATT ASHARE |  
Published: November 14, 2012 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/pop_rocks

Laetitia Sadier sticks to the Sterolab script on her new Silencio (Drag City)

For nearly twenty years, Laetitia Sadier was the French-accented voice and co-pilot in Stereolab, an enigmatic British post-rock band who combined bits and pieces of ’60s lounge pop, minimalist composition techniques, retro space-age synths, chime-and-churn guitars, affectless vocals, and strong hints of Situationist political philosophy to create oddly compelling music that defied easy categorization. Sóley Stefánsdóttir, who kindly dropped her last name when she emerged as a solo artist two years ago, got her start as a multi-instrumentalist in the eclectic Icelandic folk-pop collective Seabear, an avant garde-leaning group who nonetheless got one of their songs, "Cat Piano," included in an episode of the teen drama Gossip Girl back in 2008. Both have recently released intriguing new solo albums that toy, alluringly, with pop convention and find that sweet spot somewhere between organic beauty and stylized drama.

       Sadier's never been one to write about affairs of the heart. At least, not directly. Romantic woes just aren't her thing. Her preferred purviews are the postmodern conflict between art and commerce and tension between high and low culture. That may sound a little dryly academic, and it might come off that way if it weren't for her slyly sultry delivery. Sadier may not indulge in the sort of soul-rending, self-reflective confessionals that tends to be the stock and trade of Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and, well, most Lilith faeries, but she's no less enchanting. Sadier's distinctively stoic vocal approach may seem coldly calculated, but the distance she projects has a coolly seductive quality that echoes the Francophone pop of the ’60s, as well as the arch minimalism of ‘70s Krautrockers like Can, Neu!, and other obscurities. Let's just say that it takes a certain je ne sais quoi to open a song with the line, "Rating agencies, financial markets, and the G20s/But who are these people?," breezily, as Sadier does Silencio, in the context of the bubbly, upbeat, guitar-driven "Auscultation of the Nation," a politicized salvo that's downright danceable and remarkably accessible.

       "Auscultation of the Nation" is just one of several tunes on Silencio that serve as a timely reminder that we're not the only Western country dealing with serious economic problems, particularly in the wake of what was a rather anticlimactic end to an all-consuming, fairly contentious election that didn't quite deliver the well defined vision for an American recovery that it promised. Sadier's leftist leanings are no secret, particularly on the album's airy, atmospheric opener, "The Rule of the Game," a dreamy soundscape of strummed guitar, strings, ethereal background vocals, and textured keyboards that find her proclaiming, with utter nonchalance, "The ruling class/Neglects again/Responsibility/Over-indulged children/Drawn to/Cruel games/Pointless pleasures. . . paving the way to fascism."

       Stereolab fans won't find any of that particularly surprising: This isn't exactly new terrain for Sadier. Indeed, Silencio pretty much sticks to the Stereolab script, with Sadier offering almost random observations, in French as well as English, about everything from trigonometry and consumerism, to what might best be described as existential anxiety ("We are lost in the century/No spark in the dustbin now/Our eyelids empty," she intones in the discofied "Fragment pour le future de l'homme"). And she does so in songs that flutter and hum with deceptively simple sing-along melodies. On her own, she's a little less prone to the kind of indulgent sonic excursions Stereolab favored, as the title of their second album, Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements, suggests. Instead, she's generous with hooks and catchy choruses up until the final track, "Invitation au silence," a spoken-word piece in English and French set to little more than quiet ambience, a clever ode to the preciousness of silence in our noisy world that includes nearly two minutes of nothing.

Sóley paints surrealistic portraits on We Sink (Morr Music)

Sóley knows a thing or two about the virtues of quietude. A classically trained pianist with a pleasantly pixie-ish voice and playful sense of the absurd, she favors sparse arrangements that only occasionally incorporate anything resembling a full band. A clipity-clop rhythm that sounds a bit like someone gently tapping two wooden clogs together is all the support she needs to open the first track of We Sink, an eerie reverie called “I’ll Drown” that relies on little more than a few piano chords and paints a surrealist picture of a mysterious someone who “sleeps with his eyes open” in a house that’s “far, far away.” The song builds to an emotional chorus of “I drown when I see you” before stopping for a good five seconds of total silence. When it returns for a brief refrain, everything, including Sóley’s full-throated voice, is immersed in echoing reverb, as if to suggest she’s actually drowning.

       Small, artful touches like that are one of the elements that create a gulf between Sóley and your basic, confessional singer-songwriter, even when she’s accompanying herself on simply strummed acoustic guitar on a track like “Smashed Birds.” Another romantic song of sorts, it finds Sóley talking to trees as she finds her way to a former lover’s house, making a dress out of his notes, and eating his words, as organ drones and a subtle backbeat help her along. “Bad Dream,” a skeletal acoustic guitar track with a long pause midway through, is, as the title suggests, a strange and haunting tale about a rabbit that she fears “will jump on me and take my heart out.” And, “Dance,” which does open with a strong backbeat that comes and goes, is yet another dreamscape from beyond the looking glass, with lines like, “My soul will dance over your house.”

       Sóley’s skewed lyrics and art-damaged approach to folk place her somewhere in the range of mercurial singer-songwriters in the vein of Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom. And that playfully waifish voice and the simple fact that she’s from Iceland are sure to bring up Björk comparisons. Neither is a bad thing. But “We Sink,” with all its charming eccentricities, suggests that Sóley has the will and the vision to thrive in her own captivating world of fanciful imagery and sprightly melodies, just as Sadier seems to be doing just fine on her own.