The Stereolab Albums Poll

not including ETK & D&L in their 1990s run of excellence is madness

surely there is at least one other person here who thinks the dots to sound-dust run was their peak? cobra is a great album to get lost in, dots is a mastery of form and sound-dust is just pure beauty.

that's where I got off the bus tbh. THey lost me with Dots and Loops

Just voted for Dots...it is beautiful!

unbelievably fresh through Mars Audiac Quintet

No doubt. And it was partly through this expanding scope. I only got into them when Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements was out, but looking back, that stuff was quite an achievement in building on what they did on their early records. And then Mars Audiac Quintet was even bigger.

surely there is at least one other person here who thinks the dots to sound-dust run was their peak? - I dig some Tortoise & High Llamas, but John McIntire & Sean O'Hagan were collectively the worst thing to ever happen to the groop imo.

surely there is at least one other person here who thinks the dots to sound-dust run was their peak? cobra is a great album to get lost in, dots is a mastery of form and sound-dust is just pure beauty.

My favorite period is 1994-2000; Sound Dust was the first album of theirs I found disappointing.

I'd love if ILM polls could give you two or three voting options instead of one.

This is a massively tough one. On different days I'd pick Switched On (v.1), Dots/Loops, Mars Audiac or even Margerine Eclipse.

Despite being a superfan for a long time, I just couldn't get into Chemical Chords and have yet to hear either of the records adjacent to it. However, I have a hard time believing that they could be as good as the above.

Basically I stopped giving a shit about Stereolab around the time of D&L (which even now strikes me as a profoundly unexciting record) and like most people I never bothered much with their recent records:

1) Switched On
2) Transient
3) Mars Audiac
4) Peng
5) Refried
6) ETK
7) Aluminum
8) Low Fi (not sure why Bachelor Pad is present and this isn't--they are both EPs)
9) Bachelor Pad
10) The remix EP of Miss Modular is probably the best thing they did post-97

On Sound Dust:

I get it's probably a transitional sort of album but adore it for its ambition. It might not work flawlessly through the whole album
but Space Moth, Captain Easychord and Baby Lulu are all classic Stereolab songs imho. Also 'Suggestions Diabolique' might sound clumsy here and there but I think it's one of their most complex pieces.

1) and 2) is basically a tie at this point. I think at the time Transient came out I thought it was the best, but the early singles are what I probably pull out more these days so really that should get my vote.

factoring in the comps, I may have to vote for Refried Ectoplasm - I really think that it stands as the strongest intersection of their best traits & neatly bridges the stylistic gap b/w MAQ & ETK. plus, French Disko!

My stock answer is MAQ (heard it first, still love it), but I can only have this as my stock answer by justifying that Switched On vols. 1+2 are not "albums", and since they are here in the list, daaamn... may have to go Refried Ectoplasm, but feel pretty sad not voting for the other two as well

so yeah, my top 5 is MAQ, Switched On, Refried, Peng, ETK but it really pains me to pick an order (except ETK is probably last and I still love it)

shit I left out TRNBWA. never mind. too hard. and if EPs should be included, then Fluorescences is also pretty cool.

Fluorescences was the moment that I fell in love w/ the Lab.

surely there is at least one other person here who thinks the dots to sound-dust run was their peak? cobra is a great album to get lost in, dots is a mastery of form and sound-dust is just pure beauty.

yah id agree w/ this - at the v least dots & cobra are the ones i like the best

Refried Ectoplasm has Harmonium, John Cage Bubblegum, French Disko, plus the best bit of TRNBWA is reprised in Exploding Head Movie: these alone would be a pretty damn good case for best, but there usually isn't a single track I'm tempted to skip, unlike some of the others

MAQ 4 me

for me, dots & loops is where they went from being awesome to being pleasant

Mars Audiac Quintet was the first Lab album I've heard, perhaps that's why it's still my favourite.

x-post Dots and Loops really divides people, doesn't it? I'm right in the middle 'Lab era, owning only Mars, Emperor and Dots; I've never much backtracked (not a fan of Jenny Ondioline tbh) nor gone foward (bits I sampled seemed pretty samey.) So not really qualified to vote...

Transona Five is one of the best schaffel-beat songs ever. I love MAQ, but I can only really listen to it in chunks..

I'm a fan, and I love certain songs, but I don't think I've ever evaluated them as albums. "How do you differentiate one from the other??"--I'm somewhere close to there, but in a good way.

I can't believe the amount of haters 'dots and loops' has in here. It's one of my favorite records by them because it feels to me like a big step for them. Every album they made before you could pinpoint most of their influences - krautrock, samba, velvet underground, garcia esquivel, 60's am radio, etc... - and I feel that 'dots and loops' marks the moment where all those elements that had shaped up their songs until then stop acting as a crutch* and actually develop as a unique sound.

* Don't really know the actual english word for what I'm trying to say. In spanish 'muleta' or 'crutch' refers to a sort of phrase or action that is constantly repeated by a person, sort of a bad habit. A catchphrase or 'catchaction' so to speak.

"actually develop as a unique sound"

It's a boring sound.

I also don't have an issue with being able to pinpoint a band's influence.

Esp. when I think all the influences are awesome and doing some interesting with them.

can I just say that I'm lmao @ the huge variance in opinions itt so far. srsly, ilx, way to keep a good poll interesting!

I voted Dots & Loops, but probably bcz it was the only album of theirs I was able to find for a couple of years. My friends hated it, they called it "French Jamiroquai."

"French Jamiroquai"!

It's a boring sound.

Alex totally OTM about their "influences", sound, etc.

everything I've read about Tim Gane's current method of composing (eg, taking a several seconds-long sample, telling the band to replicate a sound/part within that sample, and then randomly rearranging the resulting parts) perfectly explains why their later stuff sounds tuneless, shapeless, and unappealing to me. It's like the quintessential empty gesture/excercise.

Actually like that record a lot, though not as much as Refried, ETK, TRN..., MAQ, etc. Sheesh, what choices. Also, LOVE Aluminum Tunes, esp. "Klang Tone".

It was an easy choice for me: Transient Random Noise Bursts if only for the full version of Jenny Ondioline, which I first heard while driving around and it tranfixed me so much I actually had to pull the car over and just listen.

"French Jamiroquai"!

b-but Transporté Sans Bouger was on a different album!

(ho ho etc)

(you don't understand, Travelling Without Moving is the name of my dog)

tee hee hee

I was there at the start with the singles 20 years ago and they've never really "lost" me the way they did others, though I do understand the criticisms of the post-McIntire sound. The absence of the Charles Long collaboration (Music For The Amorphous Body Study Center)*, which I love to bits, pushes me towards Sound-Dust as their pinnacle. Yeah, sentimental to a certain extent (Mary's swansong), but it's just gorgeous. Refried and Transient would round out the medal places.

(* - OK, it was included in full on Aluminum Tunes but that's not uniformly great...as wonderful as that triple vinyl smells...still)

Switched on vol 2 (kinda) easily

It is The Groop Played CD or Refried Switched On Volume 2. They're both pretty much perfect but I'm gonna go for the former because it was the first Stereolab I ever heard and I'm not sure anyone else will vote for it. "We're Not Adult Orientated" FTW!

like all such polls, i wonder how closely it corresponds to 'album i heard first' (my vote for tr-nbwa does)

my list is almost exactly the order i heard them.

I heard the singles on Switched On before I heard anything else, but otherwise the order is pretty random. It took me a while to hear MAQ for some reason.

I still have the swirly pink Big Money single of "Light That Will Never Cease To Fail" b/w "Au Grand Jour", I think.

nah a day smothered with corpses = the marxist thing to do peace ketchup

oh god the motorik stuff is going to win this isn't it

etk will win cause it's the casual fan favorite

whereas I feel like it feels like the greatest hits album of a band that isn't as good as stereolab

oh god the motorik stuff is going to win this isn't it

guitars rule

1997 Dots and Loops
2004 Margerine Eclipse
2008 Chemical Chords
2001 Sound-Dust
2006 Fab Four Suture
1996 Emperor Tomato Ketchup
2000 The First of the Microbe Hunters
1998 Aluminium Tunes
1999 Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night
2010 Not Music
1994 Mars Audiac Quintet
1995 Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On, Vol. 2)
1993 Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements
1993 The Groop Played "Space Age Batchelor Pad Music"
1992 Switched On Stereolab
1992 Peng!

space age batchelor pad music was the first stereolab i heard. a revelation at the time. still sounds absolutely perfect to me.

I feel like they should have saved that name for the dots and loops album

Not Music is the only one that feels half baked. There is an inconsistency in the production and sound. pretty bad cover & title. The remixes make it feel like a bonus disc. It's still pretty good but the attention to detail is not quite there.

agreed for the most part, but "Everybody's Weird Except Me" is one of my favorite Stereolab songs. Love the way the bass sounds on it, and it's a great opener.

The songs are good. I love the emperor machine remix track bit it doesn't feel like it belongs on a Stereolab album.

Refried Ectoplasm was always my favorite. Might not flow like an LP, but that collection was in many ways their most Krautrock. I listened to that one over and over doing these fixes on a book on third shift in a publishing house for a couple weeks not long after I graduated college while being amazed by how fast the internet was on a T3 in the middle of the night when you are one of the few on a network.

my problem w Stereolab from Dots n Loops on can, I suspect, be traced to Gane's increasing fascination with really bizarre compositional approaches ie

TG: Well, towards the end of Stereolab, I was deliberately causing so many problems on purpose [in terms of songwriting techniques]. I tripped myself up from about 2004 onwards; everything was really just a game from that point...

The recordings Stereolab were making were getting more and more avant-garde. In fact, for that last album, no songs were actually written. Everything was done by chance. I put fifty different chords on paper and I mixed with fifty different rhythms from drum machines or samples and we picked them out randomly and put them together, and then we decided to record only on piano or vibraphone and every song existed originally like that. I think that was a really good method! And then we had to add things to them so I made some more rules… but it still came out sounding like [it did] and that's when I knew things needed to change. I couldn't circumnavigate around this thing anymore no matter how much I tried to set up obstacles for myself. So, the band's sound just comes out and, as soon as Laetitia starts singing, it sounds like Stereolab and that's great but it's more difficult in other ways because you're just really stuck.

I mean that just sounds like a stupid way to write songs to me, it might be an interesting challenge for the musicians but the end-result isn't likely to *sound* particularly good - and instead what you hear is the tension/frustration he describes, between the identifiable elements of the band (Sadier's voice etc.) and these practically schizophrenic attempts to get away from that. it just doesn't make for an absorbing listen.

or this:

For instance, on the new record… I started an idea that’s kind of like an excavation. What I do is I cut a very very tinyloop/sample, and I just glue them together so there’s maybe eight ofthem in a row, and that’s maybe lasting about a second or a second and a half. And the kind of blurred sound gives it something you can’t really precisely put your finger on, it’s a strange kind of loop. And then I pitch-shift them up and down to make a chord. And then all we do with the band, is we just listen really closely to what we can hear,and try to reproduce it. I liken it a little bit to a sort of pop-art thing, where you’re recreating a commercial product, but in a painterly way. So instead of doing it with MIDI, we’re actually playing these tiny little things that we think that we can hear, with real instruments. For instance, there’s a track on the new album called "Pop Molecule," which is created in this way.

is just... waht. so convoluted, and not necessarily going to produce something that sounds good.

he's talking about Chemical Chords there, right? i haven't checked that one out, it really seems like he got lost down the rabbit hole... not sure if it was in this thread or the main Stereolab thread, but someone had a comment (probably years and years ago) about Cobra and Phases being the first time that the band sounded earthbound instead of outer space alchemists, and idk I couldn't disagree more... Cobra and Phases is such a great listen all the way through, consistent and yes sounding totally extraterrestrial and in total control of their powers. "Fuses" is such a killer opener... re-listening to Sound Dust and I dig it more now, but it's definitely a lesser version of Cobra and Phases imo...

yeah that last quote is re: Chemical Chords - the first quote is more recent though and is not in reference to a specific album afaict

well I take that back I guess when he says "last album" he must be referring to Chemical Chords

although I guess it could be Not Music too...? idk

both albums were recorded at the same time, I think Not Music was basically the leftovers album from the Chemical Chords session

Mars Audiac Quintet is their best album, IMO.

Have been on a Stereolab bender since this thread revive. Lots of love for Peng! and Chemical Chords actually. Amazing that they were so good for so long, and maintained their vision.

Not for me, it's gotta be "Transient". I love MAQ and ETK but they smoothed out their sound on them and "Transient" retains their essential weirdness and edge (for lack of a better word).

Really, though, the best stuff is on their singles. I could probably own only the Oscillons box and be happy.

"Transient" probably my favourite overall as well, just because "Pack Yr Romantic Mind" is the essential Stereolab track IMO

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08dns54

Tim Gane and Sean O'Hagan (with some other High Llamas and Serafina Steer) performed a Basil Kirchin tribute a couple nights ago. You can hear a piece of it at 55:30. It's really lovely. I hope there's an album. Apparently they were all originals in the style of Basil Kirchin aside from a cover of "I Start Counting" with Jane Weaver on vocals.

Ahh, I desperately wanted to go to the Kirchin event but I just couldn't get there due to work. It sounded like an amazing weekend.

Related, I just found out Sean wrote a song for Yo Gabba Gabba!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkxIEC_l9r

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkxIEC_l9rI

I think I've arrived at

1. Dots and Loops
2. Sound-Dust
3. Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night
4. Margerine Eclipse
5. Instant Holograms on Metal Film

I had a real moment with Cobra and Phases this morning. A very long, labyrinthine record to really get lost in.

Not in this order:

Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night
Dots & Loops
Emperor Tomato Ketchup
Fab Four Suture
Refried Ectoplasm

… but Margerine Eclipse belongs in this conversation

Cobra and Mars are my 1 and 2

I love a few songs on Emperor but have always found it kind of a slog, especially the 2nd half. It’s not the album, it’s me.

I hated Cobra for the longest time and then something clicked and now it’s bad ass.

transient remains undeniable

Cobra is one of a few ‘Lab albums that seems to work best as a suite of songs, as a whole

Dots and Loops just gives me emotions that I rarely access, and that I have to be prepared for. I can’t just listen to this album any old time. I loved it from the day I bought it—midnight release party at Volt Records in Danbury, Ct.

Bjork’s Homogenic came out the same day. What a time to be alive.

Folks feeling free to say that ETK is not necessarily the bees knees and that Cobra was actually pretty good, or better. Maybe this is why I've persisted with ILM for decades. :)

Love 'em all, but Cobra has always been my favourite.