Stereo Total, Avagami preview

Stereo Total/Avagami
Abbey Pub/Darkroom, Chicago
Friday, August 31, 2007/
Sunday, September 2, 2007

At their cores, Stereo Total and Avagami have little in common. Total are a French/German duo who have been terrorizing sound for more than a decade, poking and prodding punk and electro as if it were their birthright. Avagami are a barely 2-year-old Chicago pair whose pop blueprint is pretty straightforward; how it sounds is what raises questions. Yet the cosmos must have something in mind by booking them both in Chicago this weekend.

Paris-Berlin, released earlier this year by Kill Rock Stars, isn’t a regression for Stereo Total, though it does find them returning to the sounds they started their career with. Sticking to French, German, and English this time — they’ve branched out to Japanese and Turkish in the past — Françoise Cactus and Brezel Göring nonetheless have revived their nearly abandoned hyper eclecticism and turned in their most energized work since the ’90s.

“Miss Rébellion Des Hormones” casts a rebellious (as in the Parisian student riots of 1968), horny teenager against a twee-punk backdrop, then the album gets its spaz on with “Plastic,” and basically never looks back. Cactus is giddily out of tune most of the time, adding a cutesy Japanese flavor to “Komplex Mit Dem Sex,” and commands “Plus Minus Null” like a garage band dominatrix dying to sustain her arousal. Skewing the sleek, Eurosex curiosity curve is a playful revolutionary flame — Cactus and Göring are topless on the cover, but don fatigues throughout the liner photos — that peaks with some wetdream politics via “Patty Hearst” and “Baby Revolution,” the latter of which is written by controversial gay filmmaker Bruce LaBruce.

Avagami aren’t quite so upfront on their debut album, Metagami (Lens), for which Sunday’s gig is a release party. On the surface they recall fringe artists like Electric Six, Shitake Monkey, and fellow townie Bobby Conn, but there doesn’t appear to be any weirdness agenda. Metagami has challenging moments like the drum collapse of “Eagle,” but dances past you with electro rock swagger; the catch is the hate-it-or-love-it style of Eric Lebofsky and Matt Espy’s unsettling vocals. One perches in a high falsetto, the other warbles like he told too many spook stories at camp with a flashlight under his chin.

Oddly, the album’s opener is the band’s theme song and the tamest of the 11 tracks. But “Fuck The Man” and “Trombone Solo” raise the pot considerably, harboring nic-fit spazzouts once the verses clear out, clearly setting the stage for their frantic live persona. Hidden beneath the jarring voices can be some compelling pop (“Unoriginal” could have been an Annie tune), when it isn’t disguised as Colecovision (“Sickly Time”). Smartly tucked in at album’s end, their cover of Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” never feels like novelty and actually draws Metagami together, giving it a welcome touchstone.

But Stereo Total explain it best: “This is punk, this is rock ‘n’ roll, this is modern music.”

Octopus Project and Aleks & The Drummer open for Stereo Total; Mr. Russia open for Avagami.

— Steve Forstneger

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly