Duophonic Vinyl & CDs

Review: This is the album that marked a departure from a more guitar-y, orthodox approach of using drone style repetition to conjure a transcendental atmosphere. Instead, they embraced interconnecting and looping riffs, which was a creative lease of life for the band at the time. Co-founder Tim Gane has been open about his creative struggle before until they embraced this way of creating, which is more associated with hip-hop and electronica than motorik rock. The shift was a successful one with this album one of theirs one of the most celebrated in their decorated oeuvre. Opening cut 'Metronomic Underground' is up there as a highlight: melodies and ideas flow in and around each other in a dense yet hypnotic fashion. And the title-track has a magnetic groove as it invites you in and furnishes you with psychedelic sonic patterns, as chanteuse Laetitia Sadier's eerie yet beautiful vocals lure you in even further. Stereolab's music is like magic dust and this album is as strong a proof as any that they have that je nes se pais.

Review: Widely regarded as one of Stereolab's best albums, the deadpan title of their second album conveys, to an extent, what to expect. The track 'Pack Yr Romantic Mind' lives and dies on Tim Gane's noise rock bursts, which provide stunning contrast to Laetitia Sadier dream pop vocals. Gane and Sadier, as a songwriting duo, come from very different styles and ideas but it's the confluence of these that is the beating heart of Stereolab and why they're still revered more than 30 years on from when they released it. Another scorcher here to look out for is 'Jenny Ondioline', where static noise and thick, foggy post-rock ambiance gives way to a motorik beat that's Neu! and Can-level transcendental, as it whisks you into another realm, before coming back to a very present, belligerently shreddy distorted guitar outro. This is a band that pandered to no one's expectations but their own and let raw emotion guide them.