Stereolab’s Sold-Out Cleveland Debut Highlights Consistency in 35-Year Career

Thirty-five years after Stereolab formed, the band still sounds like few others. And Wednesday’s sold-out Cleveland concert showed that’s a good thing.

The quintet, led by French singer/multi-instrumentalist Lætitia Sadier and British guitarist Tim Gane, has carved out a niche with burbling synthesizers, tight drumming, quasi-political lyrics and an overall aesthetic that conjures up images of the type of home you’d live in if the world of “The Jetsons” was real. Its music has been remarkably consistent, even as it introduces other elements.

That consistency was on display in 16 indie pop/electronic/space rock songs over 95 minutes at the 1,200-capacity Globe Iron. The concert served as the band’s debut Cleveland performance (though setlist.fm says it played a show in Oberlin in 1996).

Stereolab isn’t a band that’s very emotive onstage, save for Sadier—who alternated languages when singing and switched between guitar, synthesizer and trombone—lightly bopping around on occasion. Instead, Gane and the rest of the group are content to focus on tightness and precision. Gently sung passages gave way to left-turn instrumental breaks.

The band is heavily touring behind its first album in 15 years, the excellent “Instant Holograms on Metal Film.” Half of the show came from that record, and the songs were more muscular and harder-hitting live. Several were highlights, like the instrumental “Electrified Teenybop!” and the occasionally chaotic “Melodie Is a Wound” and “Esemplastic Creeping Eruption.”

But much of the older material also stood out, like the synthesizer riffs on 1997’s “Miss Modular” and the nearly 30-year-old “Percolator.”

Sadier thanked the crowd multiple times during the show. She also professed her love for college radio, apparently at the urging of some audience members. Some took it as weighing in on the recent controversy over Cleveland State University handing the reins to the WCSB station to Ideastream Public Media, but it wasn’t clear she was clued in. Still, it was a nice sentiment.

The show concluded with a three-song encore that ended with “Immortal Hands.” Again, as the words faded, the instruments turned up, bringing the song to a climax.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take another three-plus decades for the band to return.

Opener Dorothea Paas and two backing musicians delivered 35 minutes of slow, atmospheric and sometimes jazzy music. Think a more ethereal Joni Mitchell and you’re most of the way there. The Toronto-based musician’s songs were pretty but, aside from a few standout moments, the set tended to blend together and drag a bit.

Perhaps it’d work in a more intimate setting, but in a room as big as Globe Iron, it wasn’t enveloping enough.

Setlist:
1. Aerial Troubles
2. Motoroller Scalatron
3. Transmuted Matter
4. Peng! 33
5. The Flower Called Nowhere
6. Melodie Is a Wound
7. If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt. 1
8. If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt. 2
9. Miss Modular
10. Household Names
11. Electrified Teenybop!
12. Esemplastic Creeping Eruption
13. Cybele’s Reverie
Encore:
14. The Way Will Be Opening
15. Percolator
16. Immortal Hands