The Stereolab Albums Poll

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

sound dust for me as well.

downloaded the demos thing, eaten something, last night. is this official?

Voted for Emperor Tomato Ketchup, it's my third favourite album of the 90's.

My top five would be:

1.Emperor Tomato Ketchup
2.Dots & Loops
3.Sound Dust
4.Margerine Eclipse
5.Transient Random Noise Bursts

I haven't heard a couple of the mini albums listed here. Fab Four Suture would be my least favourite.

Still haven't been able to decide between Peng! and Emperor Tomato Ketchup. Not sure the tie will ever be broken.

Transient for this guy. I tend to like the earlier stuff better than the post-Dots stuff, which is generally pleasant but not terribly engaging to me. I think the later albums would be more effective if they were reigned in to more concise 45-minute runtimes (and yes, I am aware that my favorite is over an hour long, but it's their most motorik-heavy so it works). The last one I messed with was Sound Dust.

Dots and Loops 4-ever for me.

(I've always been fond of Josh Kortbein's defense of the album.)

To which I extended the following argument (here -- though I should note that I'm not particularly proud of the essay overall):

Kortbein is right to focus on rhythm as the component that makes Dots and Loops stand out, but he doesn’t extend this idea far enough. I don’t think he is suggesting that the beats on other Stereolab albums are any less prominent; as far as I can see, the difference is that “Jenny Ondioline” and “Metronomic Underground” use rhythm in a linear fashion, whereas Dots and Loops treats it circularly. To clarify, lots of the band’s work, and especially the early stuff, is devoted to a groove, but it’s a straight, immediate, almost mechanical 4/4; you bob your head as it pushes forward, like a car zooming down an empty highway or a train rapidly clicking past each rail. Whereas on Dots and Loops more than half the songs are in some other time signature (variations on 5/4 more common even than variations on 3/4), and even the songs that aren’t tend to hold back from emphasizing any particular beat too strongly, which creates a peculiar decentering effect. The rhythm is urgent and cyclical, but you’re not always sure where the cycle starts; rather than tilting ahead, you let yourself float, as though in a whirlpool.

Margarine Eclipse has grown to become a real solid bedtime album for me. At this stage I've probably listened to it more than any of the other albums, though (given I'm usually falling asleep) not as closely as my earlier favourites like ETK and Transient.

xxpost: good reads, never really noticed it but the focus on beats is otm. The rhythm design in Dots and Loops is very specific to the overall sound and has some particularities which no Stereolab record up to that point had done before. It does mark a swift from rock experimentalism into electronica.

jaymc otm, D&L really does some great things with unconventional time signatures. I wish they'd gone further in that direction before buggering off into bossa nova jazz.

I think the later albums would be more effective if they were reigned in to more concise 45-minute runtimes (and yes, I am aware that my favorite is over an hour long, but it's their most motorik-heavy so it works). The last one I messed with was Sound Dust.

― International Waters, Tuesday, 15 March 2011 02:27 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

All the albums after Sound-Dust are less than an hour long.

I'd stick with my ranking of a few years ago except to add the most recent couple to the bottom and flip Peng! and Emperor Tomato Ketchup to put ETK back on top where it belongs.

I love the weird production on Peng!, and the songs are just better than Switched On.

I think the problem with their recent music is these endless, aimless modulations that leave all their songs feeling diffuse. Like I'm looking forward to Tim "discovering" soul or dub reggae or whatever just to start grounding the songs in popular music again.

i like the three comps more than any of their albums proper. then it's transient -> etk -> peng -> not music, then the rest, then CPGPVITMN way way down the bottom

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.