Throughout the '90s, Stereolab was consistently excellent and innovative - if by "innovative" we allow the recombining of musical DNA into new lifeforms, not inventing entirely new genes. Each album evolved incrementally from its predecessor, adding a new influence, dropping an older one - so that despite the common and uninformed notion that Stereolab always sounds the same, hardly any audible similarities link an early work like Peng! with the new Sound-Dust. Completely absent is the motorik beat that characterized the band's earlier releases (old news, that), but very little on this album carries the influences that have colored more recent releases - such as Brazilian music or electronics (every note here sounds played, not digitally reactivated from anyone's hard drive). Sean O'Hagan's rich arrangements are the band's main calling card now, and their depth, thickness, and variety nearly overwhelm Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier's still-potent melodic sense. (And that melodic sense must be reckoned with - since it probably accounts for why I find Stereolab's albums so engaging and am typically left cold after one or two listens to most High Llamas recordings.) But some tracks triumph immediately (compared with the more subtle and eventual victory of most songs here), such as the two-part "Captain Easychord," whose Beatle-y opening (Lennon-like piano chording, melodic plectrum-plucked bass, a ping-ponging pair of trumpets) yields surprisingly to a country-ish, polyphonic romp - complete with pedal steel - only to lead to a musically distinct second half, a panoply of keyboards and rhythm box. The melodic and chordal sense behind "Nothing to Do with Me" hearkens back to (of all things) Carole King's Tapestry album, although Stereolab's arrangements are thicker than that album's fairly transparent piano/guitar mix. King might be an apt citation here: certainly, the title of her best-known album would fit this one, in that I can't think of a record with a broader range of sounds. Yet despite its stylistic promiscuity, it remains distinctly the work of a particular band. As that King comparison might suggest, Stereolab's tour through its collective record collection appears to have set up camp amongst seventies pop (the flute, horn, and keyboard mixes), but also a bit of sixties jazz, and even prog-rock (the ending of "Gus the Mynah Bird" sounds like the middle section of some alternative take of Yes' "Close to the Edge"). It might concern those who buy CDs to display their hipness that those influences are way less cool than the Velvet Underground and Krautrock - hell, they're even more unhip than Francophone lounge music. With Sound-Dust, in short, Stereolab sounds even less like a rock band than its last few, increasingly rock-free albums. But for the rest of us - for whom styles and genre labels are mere descriptions, not treasured identity badges - what matters is that they continue to sound like no one else, and sound very good indeed in the process.

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