Pitchfork

Conventional wisdom says that if you go out of your way to establish a side project, it should sound different enough from your main gig to actually justify its own existence. It's one thing to recommend Monade on the basis that you'll probably like them if you like Stereolab, given the pivotal involvement of singer/lyricist Laetitia Sadier. But after listening to Monade's 2005 album A Few Steps More, it gets a bit perplexing when you hear how much a band containing precisely one member of Stereolab sounds so much like their parent group, right down to the motorik beats and the way the guitars and electric pianos create that familiar harmonic drone.

Then again, that's just another sign of how well the members of Monade have come together to work under Sadier's vision, and if you can create even the slightest variation on one of the most distinct sounds in indie rock without losing what makes it work, the question of stylistic redundancy feels a bit like nitpicking. Monstre Cosmic lies somewhere between comfort food for Stereolab fans and a cohesive work that gives Sadier and her group a bit of leeway to stretch. While Monstre Cosmic does what many of Sadier and Tim Gane's compositions have done in the past-- finding pop in the avant, reshaping and extruding weighty concepts into easily graspable doses of simple, riff-heavy rhythms-- it also tends to do so in a slightly more elegant context, trading in the subtle and thoughtful quirk of recent records like Fab Four Suture and Margerine Eclipse for an equally subtle and thoughtful grace.

Sadier has stated that Monstre Cosmic is thematically held together by an abstract conceptual notion of how light and shade interact. If it doesn't always come through clearly in the lyrics (which, per usual, are in French half the time), it does seep through in a compositional sense. "Étoile" and "Elle Topo" use these contrasts to great effect, with the former shifting from post-dusk reverie to summery noontime buoyancy and back like a 72-hour time-lapse photo, the latter ricocheting between delicate country-psych and high-speed Kraut-pop, before letting the two gradually merge. Most of the other songs on the album do so in a less-spectacular fashion-- the transformation of "Entre Chien et Loup" from a sleepy Moog-meets-chamber music dirge into a punk-velocity percussive workout is more admirable on a technical sense than an emotional one, and the rhythmic transitions of "Invitation" happen just as each groove has just about lost its steam-- but strung together as a unified work, Monstre Cosmic runs a remarkable gamut of tones and moods, even if you have to try and forget over 15 years' worth of Stereolab records to hear its freshness.