You can say what you like about Stereolab (and many people do) but name me just one band who have better album titles. From The Groop (sic) Played Space Age Bachelor Pad Music (possibly a fan's reaction to a gig) to Random Noise-Bursts With Announcements (maybe their own description) onwards to Music For The Amorphous Body Study Centre (no idea about this one) and Emperor Tomato Ketchup (the name of a Japanese cult movie), it's a cut above the usual jaded nomenclature employed these days.
Fortunately, the sense of adventure they employ in naming their albums is also evident in the content of their music, which is a blend of analogue synth sounds coupled with early Kraut-rock knob-twiddling, flavoured by the more chanteuse end of 1960s French pop, with stray bits of classic Fellini film soundtracks and just a soupcon of mellow orchestral lounge music just to keep the whole thing on-side.
People who are a bit too ironic for their own good manage to detect a kitsch element in Stereolab's music, as if their pastiche of sounds has a deliberately self-referential feel. Up your bum, I say; there may be the odd flirtation with "easy listening" somewhere in the grooves, but remember Sterolab kick-started the whole fad and removed themselves from it as soon as it became an excuse for so many lame Sunday supplement features.
Like most top-notch music, you can trace a direct lineage back to Brian Wilson. The unrivalled pop symphony that is Good Vibrations is cited by the band as a musical year zero for their work: "Good Vibrations is a wonderful, melodic song but it's also a very strange and odd selection of sounds and bits stapled together. It's far odder than what people today imagine you're able to get away with in a pop single," says founder member and chief songwriter, Tim Gaine.
It is this "oddness" of sound that has people putting Stereolab in the vanguard of the post-rock movement, a movement that has evolved from the traditional guitar, drums and bass sound, and works with a larger palette to produce work that gently nudges the boundaries of what is deemed to be orthodox or acceptable.
Put another way, more than 30 years after Smile was recorded - an album that makes Sgt Pepper sound like a selection of Oasis b-sides - the charts are still dominated by groups who still can't get beyond 1965 in terms of musical influences. Which is why Stereolab, Spiritualised, My Bloody Valentine, Tortoise, La Bradford and The High Llamas - aka the "post-rock brigade" - are feted for their innovative use of sounds, for not being technophobic and for generally producing the sort of music that is of its time and place, and not some retro nonsense cobbled together as a less-than-cunning record company marketing plan.
Since their formation in 1991, the South London-based Stereolab have had an innovative two-track release schedule which sees their more "accessible" work being put out on their own Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Discs label, and their more "experimental" stuff going out via mail order on the Super 45 label. This allows them to chart albums like Emperor Tomato Ketchup, which then allows them to fund their own projects, like the limited edition 10,000 CD edition of Music From The Amorphous Body Centre, which was music composed for a sculpture project by the artist Charles Long. It wasn't as if the latter project was some indulgent and "worthy" artistic act; the 10,000 CDs sold out in a day and featured in many of the critics' end-of-year charts.
Stereolab were last heard of in 1977 with the release of the Dots and Loops album which was produced by Tortoise's John McEntire and arranged by their part-time member Sean O'Hagan (exMicrodisney man, now with The High Llamas - if you're beginning to think that all these post-rock people hang out together, you'd be right). At the time they described the album, tersely and paradoxically as "future past", a phrase which, if used at the opening of this piece, would have saved us all a lot of time and bother. No matter: the real news is that Stereolab make their first live appearance in two years tomorrow night at the Red Box, Dublin (doors 8 p.m.).
As the man says - there's been a lotta lotta talk about this, maybe too much talk: to all the people wondering where they can get their mits on the Cotton Mather album, the following should be all you need to know. It's called Kontiki, it's released on a tiny US label called Rainbow Quartz and it is distributed by 3MV/ Pinnacle. If you're in Dublin, the lovely people at Tower Records on Wicklow Street might have a few copies; if they don't, you can order one from them. Outside Dublin, you're best off placing an order in your nearest indie record shop. The big news here is that Cotton Mather are coming over to play the new HQ venue on May 30th. It behoves you to be there.
