The Stereolab Albums Poll

Best stereolab album (till the 20th of may)

how do you differentiate one from the other??

what awesome album covers.

Before anyone says anything: The three compilations included in here aren't a hits collection but a compilation of songs from eps and singles that can't be find on any of their albums so it doesn't count as cheating.

#1 w/ a bullet
1993 Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements

next group (kinda interchangeable, all great)
1992 Peng!
1992 Switched On Stereolab
1993 The Groop Played "Space Age Batchelor Pad Music"
1996 Emperor Tomato Ketchup

rough ranking of next bunch of stuff, like all of these fine, not blown away
1994 Mars Audiac Quintet
2008 Chemical Chords
2004 Margerine Eclipse
2001 Sound-Dust
1999 Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night

meh:
2000 The First of the Microbe Hunters
1997 Dots and Loops

haven't spent enough time w/ Aluminum Tunes 2 & 3, Not Music, Fab Four to rank those soundly

Aluminum Tunes Switched On 2 & 3

sound-dust!

Top 10 for me:

1 Peng!
2 Dots and Loops
3 Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On, Vol. 2)
4 Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements
5 Mars Audiac Quintet
6 Emperor Tomato Ketchup
7 Margerine Eclipse
8 Sound-Dust
9 Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night
10 Chemical Chords

how can you rank Peng at 1 but not have the first Switched On in the top 10? If anything, Switched On is slightly better than Peng but they're basically the same record.

my top 5:

1. Mars Audiac Quintet
2. Switched On Stereolab
3. Aluminum Tunes
4. Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements
5. Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On, Vol. 2)

proper LPs, ranked:

1993 Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements
1996 Emperor Tomato Ketchup
1994 Mars Audiac Quintet
1997 Dots and Loops
2004 Margerine Eclipse
2008 Chemical Chords
1993 The Groop Played "Space Age Batchelor Pad Music"
1992 Peng!
2006 Fab Four Suture
2001 Sound-Dust
2000 The First of the Microbe Hunters - (technically an EP, but whatev)
1999 Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night

(I haven't yet listened to Not Music)

Top 5:

1. Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On, Vol. 2)
2. Peng!
3. Emperor Tomato Ketchup
4. Mars Audiac Quintet
5. Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night

Don't think I've heard the first Switched On, actually. Nor have I heard much of their post-2000 output.

how can you rank Peng at 1 but not have the first Switched On in the top 10? If anything, Switched On is slightly better than Peng but they're basically the same record.

― brotherlovesdub

To be honest I haven't listened to the first Switched On yet... reason I've not included it. I promise I will finally get to it this weekend.

1. Switched On
2. Peng
3. Mars A Q
4. ETK
5. Dots and Loops
6. Transient
7. Space Age
8. Refried Switched on 2
9. Aluminum Tunes
10. Not heard anything post Aluminum Tunes that I wanted to hear a second time

transient random etc. etc. followed by dots & loops

Absolutely everything they've done is worth hearing, if you like them. Although the post-Sound-Dust albums feel just so less inspired..

Cobra.

Dots & Loops is my personal favorite, but I haven't listened to them in years.

They were unbelievably fresh through Mars Audiac Quintet and began showing a preference for quantity over quality circa Refried Ectoplasm singles into Emperor Tomato Ketchup. They tried to reinvent themselves shortly afterward to great bouts of inconsistency and it was just a chore to keep up from that point on. I got to see them live in that middle era when they were really a tight unit.

I miss Mary Hansen very much.

mostly OTM altho I disagree about the quantity over quality through ETK caveat

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."

Dots and Loops was the turning point imo.

Loved the Lab from Super-Electric on but oddly enough I kind of tuned out around the Mars period - loved ETK but when Dots came out I was already a big MoM and Tortoise fan so it was a bit of a dream team and I still see it as a high water mark, on the right day Diagonals is my favourite Lab track. Sound-Dust is gorgeous too. Can't get to Cobra and a few things around there (Instant 0, Microbe Hunters) but the last two albums are also great. Consistent taste, not much!

Diagonals is so great

I wanted to like Dots more and played it a lot but it wasn't Autoditacker or even Millions Now Living. Another one I might have to revisit.

Yeah, it's no secret I'm a massive Sean O'Hagan admirer, and I think sound-dust has his fingerprints all over it. People seem to neglect to mention that he's involved in nearly all their stuff, even the early albums, so I think it's unfair to blame him for whatever developments occurred later in their career. I do think Tim and L Safire wanted to pull the band in that direction in the end since they actually wrote most of the songs...

Sadier*

Fab Four Suture is probably my least favorite album, and it lacks O'Hagan...

Fantastic sounding record, that Margerine. Dual mono ftw.

― Noel Emits, Saturday, February 11, 2017 3:52 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Never heard this - what is 'dual mono??'

For all the songs, they recorded a full band's worth of tracks on the left channel and a completely different set of tracks on the right. So everything is hard-panned left and right but sounds like one coherent song. It's an interesting approach and generally sounds good, although the songs tend to be a bit busy.

wow! Need to hear that. Thanks!

Fab Four Suture does have "Excursions Into Oh, A-Oh" which is one of the few final Stereolab tracks to truly rock.

Stereolab were a truly great band to see live - I saw them on "Fab Four Suture" tour and it really helped to make sense of their discography. Hearing 'Jenny Ondioline' and Dots & Loops material in the same set showed they could tap in and out of their sound evolution pretty seamlessly.

xp Moodles I think they just created two mono mixes of each song from the multitracks, emphasising very different elements for each, then placed them L/R as the stereo mix. So it's not like they recorded separate versions, and the instruments which are present in both mixes (e.g. lead vocal, drums) end up somewhere in the middle of the stereo field because they are in both ears. If it was all hard panned it would be pretty unpleasant on headphones, a la early Beatles albums in stereo, but there are definitely elements present in each mix which are absent from the other. The mixes sound good isolated if you have the right kind of mono selection on your hi-fi.
Hairsplitting much? yes guilty.

I'm not sure exactly the process they followed to record it, but the left channel has vocals, synths, bass, guitar, drums that are completely different from the right channel. For example, there are full (and different) drum tracks on each channel.

Surely everybody loves ETK.

― Noel Emits, Saturday, February 11, 2017 8:44 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Emperor Tomato Ketchup was where I got on board back in the '90s, but I went backwards in the discography before I went forwards, so I generally have a fondness for that stuff. I like some of the post-Dots and Loops stuff, but not all.

I didn't so much get off the bus as much as pop off the bus to go get a can of coke at a mandated rest point, fully intending to get back on at some point.

I think it was 'cobra and milky bar' or whatever, there's a small number of subsequent albums, there's still time..

Actually, just saw again the pic up top..

Hmm, quite a few. And a perfect square.

Not many I don't have, actually.. The one with biscuits.. Actually, didn't that one come out on 7" singles? Mmm, yeah.

Three, then. Including one of the early ones.

Lester Bangs eat yr heart out..

Moodles holy shit, I think you are right and I apologise for "correcting" you. Only the basslines seem to be in both channels.

I love ETK, but it will never be my favourite - something about the sequencing slightly bugs me, and Cybele's Reverie (a great single) just doesn't fit with the rest of the LP. Margarine Eclipse is the opposite - nothing really stands out, but it all flows together perfectly.

Revisiting Sound Dust now, so much better than I remember. Having fun looking thru the credits on it and Cobra and finding out which songs Jim O'Rourke produced.

"Sound Dust" is definitely one of my favourite Lab records. I've said before that it's a perfect winter/snow album - "Suggestion diaboloque" has an awesome jingle bell like funk break.

I think all of their albums are consistently fantastic, Chemical Chords + Not Music included.

but I think Mars is my fav.

^ Agreed. It's a shame Tim Gane said that he felt that it was time to take a break as it seemed like they had reached a certain end stylistically (to paraphrase). I don't think the final albums were dull or samey at all.

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.