Laetitia Sadier - The Trip

For many people Laetitia Sadier will be forever linked with Stereolab, the band she founded with Tim Gane in the early 90’s and went on to release a ton of records with up until their hiatus in 2009. But for me, being just an accidental Stereolab listener, she will be more linked with McCarthy, the best band ever (if you ask me, which I’m not quite sure that you do), that she joined when she met Gane at a McCarthy show in Paris in the late 80’s. She provided backing vocals for their last album, 'Banking, Violence and the Inner Life Today', and translated the lyrics from English to French for the inner sleeve for their second album, 'The Enraged will Inherit the Earth'. In the mid-90’s Sadier started making songs on her own, under the name Monade, and under that moniker, she released a couple of singles and three albums, recorded with various musicians that helped her out, until their final gig last year. Now she’s back with her first solo album with her own name on it, and it’s a step back from the post rock sound of Monade, and to a more pop oriented sound. Sure, it’s tempting to draw comparisons to Stereolab, but it would be unfair. Instead I hear lots of other bands in her songs, from the weird bass lines in early Go-Betweens songs in 'Another Monster' to the minimalistic intro to 'Ceci est le Coeur', which gives me instant flashbacks to the fabulous Marine Girls (the band Tracey Thorn was in before she founded Everything But The Girl with Ben Watt). Not being overly familiar with the Monade records, I really must say that I like this new direction of Laetitia’s music and I’m sure I will be playing this album quite a lot this autumn.

Track Listing:-

1 One Million Year Trip
2 Fluid Sand
3 Our Interests Are The Same
4 Natural Child
5 Statues Can Bend
6 By The Sea
7 Unfasten
8 Un Soir, Un Chien
9 Another Monster
10 Ceci Est Le Coeur
11 Summertime
12 Release, Open Your Little Earthling Hands