Stereolab - Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage In the Milky Night

Growing up along with a band must strongly affect how one enjoys the music. Waiting for each new album, feeling the excitement and inevitable dissapointment of new music from old friends, maybe even feeling surprise when musicians you thought you knew still manage to do something you didn't think they could. I think these relationships are important and complex, and unfortunately I have only a few of them. And many of those relationships ended badly. Maybe one day I can reevaluate the music I loved when I was younger and my tastes were different.

Coming to a band after it's all over produces something totally different. Each sucessive album isn't percieved as a move in this or that direction. Instead it's taken as part of a homogenous whole. Progress, growth, evolution - the hallmarks of any relationship - are removed and replaced by a monolith: the "collected works" syndrome I suppose.

This is Stereolab's worst album. So says almost every source I can find. I think it's beautiful, and it's by far my favorite album by them. This album, coming when it did, after Dots and Loops, another obscure and difficult album of jazzy lounge pop, must have seemed like a slap in the face. Or just laziness perhaps. Stereolab up to their old tricks, spinning their wheels in the mud.

I'm lucky to have missed all that. I can love the album free of expectation, free of investment of heart and mind in music I haven't heard yet. I can take it for what it is; and see its (very) subtle beauty. This makes up a little for the feeling I have that I am a musical archeologist, finding the remains of dead things and breathing life into them after the fact.