Stereo Total - Do the Bambi (2005)

A few years ago I played a punk rock show with a grindcore band at a
sushi restaurant in a hippie influenced city and north Carolina. It
was a pretty strange experience accompanied appropriately by strange
synthetic bleeps and bloops and a french woman smoothly crooning over
the pa. The music continued while we were eating, foraying into surf
music, garage rock and rapping. Once I heard the theremin I knew I had
to figure out what the fuck this was.

The bartender told me it was Stereo Total and naturally that this new
record wasn't as good as the old stuff. He told me it wasn't noisy
enough... Too poppy. I told him I loved it, I love pop music and he
was kind enough to burn me a copy.

Since then I have been trying to wrap my brain around stereo total. I
have LOVED this record at times, I've HATED it at times and upon
listening to it today I'm still not sure where I stand. Most of my
problems come back to the fact that at nineteen tracks, this record is
too damn long yo.

Aside from trailing off quite significantly after "Cannibale", every
track on this record could stand alone on a seven inch (if the one-two
punch of "Hungry!" and "Ne M'appelle Pas Te Liche" was the only thing
this band ever released I think they would be my favorite band ever.)
There is a LOT going on here that differentiates this french
male/female duo from other beat/synth driven dance pop, making them
pretty damn special because this could be pretty damn awful.

While this record goes to a million places, those places never seem to
come back together and aside from the build up of the first few
tracks, it really lacks congruity. I guess that's alright because a
lot of these songs are so good and inventive. But I have a hard time
thinking of any context where I would want to listen to all these
songs in a row. Still worth checking out though.