CD Review

Pan-European polyglot poppers Stereo Total seem to always summon the same images in American minds: trendy coffee bars, tightly-dressed Euro hipsters, neon lights against shadowy backgrounds. It’s certainly the style their album covers more or less convey, especially prominent on their new Sub Pop debut Do The Bambi, on whose cover a green deer logo and the album’s title illuminate the faces of the band from above.

Do The Bambi stays true to Total’s formula. Track after track pummel the listener with disorienting lyrics that somehow have the same effect whether they’re in French, German and English: a fun sleaze, a purposeful blow-up of our conceptions of Euro-trash culture. “I am Naked,” the album’s lead single, is a prime example, as German singer Brezel Goring prattles on in kitty-cat vocals at a second-grade register about the virtues of nudity. The bad translations (and the frequent intrusion of a gruff gravelly-voiced “rapper”) can’t help but bring to mind the debt the band owes to Björk’s Icelandic ’80s band the Sugarcubes, for both groups’ consciousness of (and commitment to) the fact that their translations might not translate so well into English. But Total is all synth, bips, beeps, and Euro-kitsch nostalgia like the faux-Gainsbourg “Orange Mécanique,” in which the woman plays the narrator, her moody tones accompanied by “Melody Nelson”-like bits of soprano.

Most of the memorable melodies of the album’s are found in the second half; the most exciting moment in the first half is “Cinémania,” a celebration of the movies that consists of a rattling list of movie stars, including some amusing pronunciations of famous names. Then Do The Bambi’s energy picks up, right when you’re getting sick of the digital age. While the simply-titled “Hungry!” explodes a minute and a half from the end with tremendous pick-up, velocity and an actual guitar line; but, of course, this is after three minutes of foods listed in French alternating with a chorus of “I am hungry / Cause you’re not here any more / Hungry / Me so hungry!” The next track, “Ne M’Appelle Pas Ta Liche” continues in the speedy surf-rock of “Hungry!” with an added degree of cool and almost desperation in the chorus’ exit of “deteste!”

Strangely after 18 tracks of “Europa Neurotisch” and “Partymädchen Gefoltert,” the album ends on “Chelsea Girls,” a low-key and echo-filled song about the sad, out of luck ladies of Chelsea. What might just seem like an odd note to go out on is just another part of the Total humor: and it’s this unique spirit, love it or hate it, that defines Stereo Total, never so much as on Do The Bambi.