With mortorik drums, mellow piping synths drifting, hazy psychedelic guitars and handclaps all twist together with Sadier’s voice low in the mix and acting as much as another instrument as a focal point, ‘Something Shines’ is at once bright and shimmery, and also wistful and contemplative.
‘Quantum Soup’ is precisely the sort of blissful soft-focus tune that Stereolab built a career producing. The brittle contemporary eurofolk of ‘Then I Will Love You Again’ is awash in wistfulness and ‘Release from the Centre of Your heart’ evokes 60s / 70s cinema. The delicate, stripped back ‘Transhumance’ stands out in its simplicity and directness, and sounds fresh.
Lyrically – and the dappled hues of the music and Sadier’s laid-back vocal style often result in the words drifting by without demanding any serious attention – there are some clumpy lines. As an exploration of Debord’s ‘La Société Du Spectacle’ (the work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory that was pivotal in the emergence of Situationism and has reoved to be a recurring point of reference for Sadier) it’s interesting enough, but terms like ‘astro-physicist’ never roll mellifluously off the tongue. Still, this is all part of the album’s (and Sadier’s) quirky charm and we wouldn’t want ‘Something Shines’ to be anything different.
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Laetitia Sadier Online
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