Stereolab - No Music. Your views.

I am about 25 minutes in and I am positively surprised. Especially after the very deceiving Laetitia Sadier album. Lots of old school Stereolab in the vein of Neu! but quite varied at the same time. A little bit of experimentation/improvisation but not too much. The cover art is abominable but it's the music, stupid!

First listen here

http://media.npr.org/assets/music/firstlisten/2010/11/stereolabcover_sq.jpg

Snot Music

very mainstream Stereolab, not great, not bad, somwhere in the middle, skippable.

what is "mainstream" stereolab

skippable

more easy listening, poppy,a bit banal. much less creative compared to their best work

i've been digging both this and the sadier solo album. essential? maybe not, but it's stereolab, and I <3 stereolab.

whenever stereolab were great which was especially in the beginning they were easy listening.

yeah I don't buy this "challenging" = avant-garde = less mainstream = qualitatively "better" Stereolab false binary

but not only/mainly
xpost

easy listening+avant garde = great

easy listening by itself = boring

the combination of styles and ideas made them great - the pop AND the experiment.

now it seems they are focused on one element, the more boring one imo, and ran out of new ideas.

i dunno, this album does not sound like easy listening to me! it's super complex/weirdly arranged. sometimes to its detriment, tbh.

whenever stereolab were great which was especially in the beginning they were easy listening.

― alex in mainhattan, Tuesday, November 9, 2010 1:30 PM (5 minutes ago)

not willing to argue but if anything they started out way more heavier and intense and mellowed through the years.

heavy and intense are not adjectives i would apply to early stereolab. their stuff was very light, very easy, very minimal, quite melodic. her voice added to this obviously. altogether something like bossa nova plus krautrock.

I'm just now listening to the album, but I liked Perpetua's observation:

You know how food and beverages can be described as having a good “mouthfeel”? Pretty much anything Tim Gane composes will have a good “earfeel.” It’s always going to be a superficially pleasant experience, but you can’t count on the music being resonant or emotionally urgent.

i would definitely trust Perpetua on his opinion of food and beverages, probably more than music tbqh.

"bossa nova plus krautrock"

maybe in mars audic.
not in emperor tomato and/or transient random (arguably their best work)

xxpost

"Pretty much anything Tim Gane composes will have a good “earfeel.” = i'm a die hard Stereolab fan so i'll like everything theyll do

i would definitely trust Perpetua on his opinion of food and beverages, probably more than music tbqh.

this from the board's resident foodie lol

earfeel is the worst word i have heard since mouthfeel

I feel you

heavy and intense are not adjectives i would apply to early stereolab.

"The Seeming and the Meaning"? "Stomach Worm"?

I'm about 25 minutes into this album, it's just starting to pick up now with the krautrock/disco stuff. Everything up until now was fairly standard, middling, post-Mary Hanson fare.

lotsa revisionism ITT about the soft/easy-listening beginning of Stereolab.

Yeah, I don't see anything particularly easy-listening about Peng!

High Expectation is pretty easy on the ears

peng! isn't hard listening, is it? i meant easy listening not in the genre term, just as a description of the aural entrance barrier to the music which is very low, i'd say. for me it was when i heard it first. one reason might have been that i was well prepared as i had listened a lot to velvet underground and some krautrock before. stereolab sounded so very much like music i had heard before that it hurt. but somehow they were different. and i fell in love with laetitia's voice immediately.

i think that 'Delugeoisie' and perhaps 'Two Finger Symphony' are the only titles that live up to the band's normal high standard

heavy and intense are not adjectives i would apply to early stereolab. their stuff was very light, very easy, very minimal, quite melodic. her voice added to this obviously. altogether something like bossa nova plus krautrock.

― alex in mainhattan, Tuesday, November 9, 2010 2:01 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

the heavy part of early stereolab to me = stuff like "contact" & "surrealchemist". thick, gooey guitar+organ sludge, head-nodding kraut repetition beneath shifting layers of distortion. loved that period of the band, when they were balancing high-octane psychedelic fuzz against breezy, minimal pop. loved them up through emperor tomato ketchup, their most refined combination of pop hooks and psychedelic texture. after that, their pop instincts began to falter and the aggressive tension disappeared from their music. lots of people love the sophistication of their music during this period, but i lost interest.

i think that 'Delugeoisie' and perhaps 'Two Finger Symphony' are the only titles that live up to the band's normal high standard

― mookieproof, Tuesday, November 9, 2010 4:12 PM (1 hour ago)

lol – someone suggested "One Finger Symphony" on that thread

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― the Whiney G. Weingarten Memorial 77 Clique (Shakey Mo Collier),

ha, that's the first thing I saw too. Somebody had to have seen that when they designed it!

I really like this album a lot, think it is the best of their last couple releases. maybe i was just in the mood for Stereolab, but this is activating the musical pleasure receptors.

really like the mini-suite form of the Silver Sands remix. It wouldn't be a Stereolab album without a marathon track but they managed to spice it up a bit.

yeah, i think that's my fave thing here.

favourite lab album since ETK

Keep going back, keep losing interest.