After concentrating on film music for a few years,
Stereo Total returned with
Les Hormones, a set of songs that proves the time off did them good. Perhaps because they experimented on their scores, the duo's music is more tightly defined here than it has been in some time.
Les Hormones sounds like classic
Stereo Total, full of zapping synths, twangy guitars, chunky beats, and the perfectly imperfect voices of
Brezel Goring and
Francoise Cactus. Indeed,
Cactus produced the album, giving it just enough lo-fi grit to hark back to the band's early days, but not slavishly; besides, even the usual
Stereo Total sound is far from routine. Over the course of
Les Hormones,
Cactus and
Goring range from the winsome pop of "Fleur de Hollande," the raucous garage-punk of "Good Night, Bad Morning" and the erotic kitsch of "Labu Hotelu (Das Stundenhotel)," imbuing it all with the offhanded outlandishness that has defined the duo for decades. The collision of synth strings, xylophone, and samples on "Cactus Berry" sounds like thrift shop trip-hop, while "Halt Deine Kerze Gerade" delivers an even more unlikely combination of atonal electronics, a martial beat and a bugle. As wild as
Les Hormones' sounds get, the songwriting is some of
Stereo Total's sharpest; though this is their first album without any covers, "Adieu Sophie" and "It's All Because of You" are so catchy and memorable that they sound instantly familiar. Endearingly raw and stylish at the same time,
Les Hormones is the sound of
Stereo Total doing what only they can do, and doing it at their best. ~ Heather Phares