Stereolab Piles On Sounds to Create an Eclectic Tempest

Though it’s been churning out records for nearly a decade, it seems Stereolab has finally aligned itself with the Zeitgeist--or vice versa. Rapacious cultural scavengers, the English sextet’s retro-futurist blend of exotica, electro-squonk and jazzy drone has it playing to large and enthusiastic audiences on the current tour.

Stereolab’s sound is a neatly patterned tempest. At its Troubadour show Sunday (which followed a Saturday show at the Palace), virtually all of the material used elemental, lock-step rhythmic motifs as armature. Band members then piled on Moog burps, synth chord clusters, swatches of guitar and vocal lines until it arrived at circular grooves that were constantly changing shape and gaining momentum. Stereolab’s two female vocalists, Mary Hansen and Laetitia Sadier, thrust and parried through each other’s lines, achieving a dense, dynamic mesh that added the tart flavor of mid-’60s French pop.

Stereolab can swing like a post-bop combo, but it’s also masters of minimalism. At the Troubadour, it teased out two-chord vamps until all of the sonic possibilities had been explored.

Show opener Olivia Tremor Control was as ornate as Stereolab was austere. Part of the Elephant Six collective based in Athens, Ga., Olivia Tremor Control is obsessed with replicating the wide-screen sound of mid-’60s psychedelic pop using lo-fi resources. At times, the band was charmingly endearing, but without a strong vocalist, OTC occasionally devolved into an unfocused, amorphous mess.