"Chemical Chords" is the first album proper from Stereolab in four years (since 2004's "Margerine Eclipse"). It's the eleventh album in an illustrious career, and is the result of a new approach the band has taken to song composition. Tim Gane started messing with “seventy tiny drum loops”, adding improvised chord sequences using piano and vibraphone, building them up, slowing the tracks down or speeding them up. The album features song writing by Laetitia Sadier, Tim Gane and company (including one solo-Tim Gane composition), as well as string and brass arrangements from Sean O'Hagan (ex-Stereolab, High Llamas). The result is an album of 14 new tracks brimming with Motown-like drums, O'Hagan's finest baroque-pop brass and string arrangements and etched with some of Laetitia Sadier's most eloquent, mellifluous vocal performances to date. It is, nonetheless, classic Stereolab; a perfect equipoise between an implausibly cool past and a shamelessly exotic future.