This is Stereolab’s take on Motown, but that doesn’t mean you can dance to it. Like most Stereolab, Chemical Chords is all about the drone, with chord changes that create the illusion of movement without really changing things, and ornamentation that dresses up the drone without obscuring it. The band’s gift has been to make pop from the drone and its accompaniment, and here it succeeds—at least structurally. Little catches, but everything is made in pop’s form and image. The instrumental “Pop Molecule (Molecular Pop 1)” jumps out, but more for its strobe effect and aggressive, fuzzed-up sound than its hook.

This is the band at its most static, which interests me without necessarily being fun. It’s also the band at its prettiest thanks to the return of Sean O’Hagan (of the High Llamas), but that doesn’t necessarily mean Chemical Chords is pretty. His love of Brian Wilson joins Tim Gane’s affection for retro sound, but the album doesn’t evoke the past. Instead, as is so often the case with Stereolab, it pulses along down its own private path delivering curious, sometimes theoretical, pleasures.