stereolab space age bachelor pad music songs

Tracks you need: Brittle, The Light That Will Cease To Fail Super-Electric (1991)ĭropping a few months after Super 45, Super-Electric is a respectable step forward that spreads that album’s core sound over a wider range of ideas. Stereolab’s focus and palette are fairly narrow here, but they make decent work of fat-free guitar pop. “Brittle” gets my vote for the brightest banger here, but the standard is fairly even across all four songs. It’s appropriately noisy, repetitive and aloof, but also good fun – and a surprisingly good start! Gane’s choice of guitar tones leaves nothing to be desired, while Sadier dishes out one of her more urgent performances with enough conviction that the tracks’ relative one-dimensionalism is easily forgiven. Stereolab’s first EP is a fuzzy set of guitar jams that see Sadier, Gane and the early roster take a shot at transmuting Neu!’s deadpan aesthetic into a basis for warbly pop bangers (a shared mission statement for everything up to and including Low Fi). These are generally pretty decent and offer helpful chronological snapshots of the development of the band’s sound. This is compounded by their mountains of non-album material to keep things from snowballing too badly, I’m going to avoid their many compilations and instead focus on the EPs that contain exclusively non-album material. Centred around the creative partnership between multi-instrumentalists Lætitia Sadier and Tim Gane, Stereolab have done it all at this point: while most frequently labelled as experimental pop or, less commonly, post rock, they’ve dipped their fingers into krautrock, lounge, indietronica, noise pop, drone, jazz, shoegaze, and more, pulling all of them off with enough conviction, sophistication and personability to inspire a healthy wave of musicians to follow in their footsteps. Their discography is a treasure chest of quirky stylistic twists, and with their ten LPs ranging from decent to superb quality, they maintain a thoroughly impressive quality standard across their stylistic contortion act. It stands out as the only moment on that record that I paused and rewound on first listen last night to confirm that I had heard it correctly, and it solved the problem I had been grappling with as I came to the end of marathoning the Stereolab discography: how on earth do you go about writing a fresh introduction to such an iconic, influential and well-chronicled band?įortunately, Phil was so kind as to answer this question by (probably) confirming my loose theory: pick out any forward thinking artist active in the indieverse over the last two and a half decades or so, and there’s a strong chance they count Stereolab as one of their favourites. This is unfortunately not my anecdote, but rather a disconcertingly well-timed snippet from Phil Elevrum’s reminiscences on the new Microphones album. “I saw Stereolab in Bellingham and they played one chord for fifteen minutes / Something in me shifted / I brought back home belief I could create eternity.” There will be lots of words and a few pictures, but the main deal is that if a band features here, they are good and you should listen to them! And if you already jam them, hit up the comments and explain where and why this is wrong! Get going!

This feature is part of a hopefully ongoing series aimed at exploring the discographies of interesting and/or important bands whose wider body of work is often overlooked on this site.

Stereolab space age bachelor pad music songs