Stereolab
Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night
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Stereolab
Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night
Elektra, 1999
RiYL: Lounge music. |
Thirteen songs later, the album closes with "Come And Play In The Milky Night," sung in the same style - as if to close the circle. In between, Stereolab indulge in the usual mastery of mining the depth of musicology. "People Do It All The Time" and "The Spiracles" play again with the laziest tones of 1960s easy listening, with the exception of the keyboard's seemingly improvised avant-garde patterns. "Infinity Girl" and, to some extent, "Puncture In The Radax Permutation" and "Caleidoscopic Gaze" turn the kitsch into serious art, thanks to the complex counterpoint of voices.
The basic ideas behind Stereolab's songs are elementary. They are complicated by the production of Tortoise's John McEntire and ex-Gastr Del Sol guitarist Jim O'Rourke, and promoted to intellectual exercizes by a combination of references to minimalism, Frank Zappa's orchestral scores and Canterbury's difficult harmonies. Stereolab can thus tackle both Brazilian pop ("The Free Design") and funk ("Blips, Drips And Strips") without falling into the realm of the trivial. The dadaist tone of "Italian Shoes/Continuum," halfway between the essence of Art Bears and Frank Zappa, crowns the trick.
Each Stereolab album has its tour-de-force, and on Cobra And Phases Group, it's the eleven-minute "Blue Milk." The song lays a bridge between Terry Riley's minimalist suites and the Velvet Underground's tribal ragas: a highly erudite essay, but interesting mainly to professional critics and rabid avant-rock listeners. By now, everything comes easy to Stereolab, and Cobra And Phases Group is by no means a bad album. The band can orchestrate its scores blindfolded, but there basically isn't a single note on here that we have not heard before.
PIERO SCARUFFI | Piero Scaruffi runs the exhaustive music database Scaruffi.com. A native of Italy, he has also been praised for his work on the General Theory of Relativity, formal theories of the mind, and artificial intelligence. And no, we aren't making that up.