Like magpies, Stereolab have made a career out of borrowing bits of other people's sounds and building their own newfangled nests out of them. What I didn't expect was to be strongly reminded of their song "Emperor Tomato Ketchup" when listening, for the first time, to Harry Nilsson's "Jump Into the Fire" (thanks to Spoilt Victorian Child). The rhythmic structure, drum fills, and propulsive bass lines all have their analogues [ahem] in the Stereolab song. What the groop didn't borrow was the Stones-y guitar riffing and the Robert Plant-style echo on the vocals (two of the few recogisable musical tropes yet to be employed by the 'Lab). For which we are grateful. Although both suit the Nilsson song just fine.
Postscript: a fraction of a second after hitting the "Publish" button on this entry it dawned on me that there is a Stereolab/Nilsson connection: the soundtrack to "Midnight Cowboy", best known for the Nilsson recording of Fred Neal's "Everybody's Talkin'" (but personally loved for the mournful harmonica-driven title track, by John Barry), contains not only two songs by something called The Groop (by which moniker Stereolab have long described themselves) but also a seven-minute epic called "Old Man Willow", performed by Elephants [sic] Memory, which in many ways can be seen as a template for all that Stereolab have done.
