Monade: like a walk in an enchanted garden

In the world where beauty should be prescribed as a therapy drug for 95 per cent of citizens, music used to be medication-like and we’ve not encountered more curative one in a fair while. Monade’s ‘A Few Steps More’ is as brite as a spring morning, as delicate as a flatter of butterfly wings, as beautiful as a rose with dewdrops on its patel.

Music here is equally child-like and hallucinogenic, as if alternating between Neverland and Wondeland and our guide is this dainty voiced ‘Alice’. It gets really ‘curiouser’ because nowt seems impossible here: music genre mesh into a whole new compositions that don’t follow cliché formats. Y’know, if you set you mind to it you can move mountain ranges… [Or, as majority of artisans, have a problem lifting a loaf of bread.]

Off-kilter with free [jazz?] mind… But, a slightly different angle on musical landscape is to be expected when the main protagonist’s prime instrument is - trombone. There are ethereal moments like ‘2 Portes, 7 Fenetres’ that make you float like humans in Magritte’s painting, more dancey with jazz trimming is ‘Dittysweep’ that builds to hypnotic finale of dramatic ending; ‘Becoming’ is more spaced out, ‘Sensible et Extensible’ starts like a soundtrack to a modern ‘Un Homme et Une Femme’ before deviating into this delightful free-form piece.

Monade’s music is part-Elizabethan, part out-of-time, wholly spellbinding; when it ends with ‘There Are Things That No One’s Told You About’, you are left despondent because there is no more than just over 43 minutes. Monade correspond with eternity, they attempt to capture ‘toujour’, and far from ‘only-interested’ in fringe benefits fame can bring. ‘… Steps…’ is as exquisite as the finest chiba.

Monade is the nom de plume of Laetitia Sadier when she isn’t fronting Stereolab that has grown out of her bedroom-recording project to become a four-headed vehicle for Laetitia (vocals, Moog, trombone), Marie Merlet (bass, vox), Nicolas Etienne (keys) and Xavier Chabbellard (drums).

‘… Steps More’ is Monade’s second album although the previous one, ‘Soucialisme Ou Barbarie’ (issued April 2003), was billed as ‘The Bedroom Recordings’ to indicate it being a collection of her solo work, reflecting the DIY nature of the material.

‘A Few Steps More’, as the title states, recorded in a proper studio (Stereolab’s Instant Zero, located in Bordeaux). As quirky, mellow and enthralling as the God-given procreating process!

This album’s visual equivalent could be ‘Dejeneur sur l‘Herbe’ by Jean Renoir: warm, loving, idyllic, human… Without gratuitous

8/10

Extra! A 3 CD and DVD box-set ‘Oscillions From the Anti-Sun’, comprising all of Stereolab’s EPs and videos for the now defunct Elektra label, will be released via Too Pure/Duophonic in late April.

[Brand new recordings by the band are also expected shortly, the same labels promise.]