Replay: Stereolab, Mars Audiac Quintet, 1994

By this point, it's easy to assume that bands that swear by analog instruments in a solidly digital age have done so on the basis of image, i.e., retro for retro's sake. Some surely have, but there are the more serious ideologues who embrace a healthy paranoia--that the seductive power and promise of digital sound must be resisted here and there just to keep a hold on our souls.

Quick review: All electronic instruments run on electricity, but digital versions rigidly divide the world into myriad zeroes and ones. Analog instruments--even synthesizers--don't. From the wall outlet to your ear, they stick to a language more similar to your hair dryer than your cell phone. Of course, on the timescale of human evolution, even hair dryers are pretty new. It's strange that we could already long for the quaint, decades-old antiquity of bleeps, zaps, swoops and unearthly drones, but we do. Analog is organic, like our brains. It feels good. Bands like Stereolab allow us to become big housecats, snuggled up against the humidifier's maternally soothing 60-hertz AC hum.

Fortunately, Stereolab takes that same wall current in directions a humidifier can't. Mars Audiac Quintet came from the analog minds of Tim Ganes and Nico-esque chanteuse Laetitia Sadier, and the album purrs on its own. Even with such clear nods to the cool, spacey ethic of pioneers like Kraftwerk, MAQ favors drone over zap, wrapping us in a velvety trance-fuzz that could merely have become, under sleepier management, moribund kitsch. It's not. Despite an international membership and trippy '60s melodic vision that would threaten to yield instant pretense, Stereolab is solidly something. MAQ is one of those albums with gloriously recognizable opening strains ("Three-Dee Melodie") and easy-to-learn rules of engagement. For all of the density, there's still a modest space taken up by the band, and it's one that it decorates impeccably. Some more overtly stylized things happen now and again ("Ping Pong," "Fiery Yellow"), but then there's "Nihilist Assault Group," which grooves hard and originally, even managing to downshift the vocal key midway through while gaining energy. Ah, what some musicians can aspire to when they've escaped the inhumanity of digital harassment.--Dave Surratt