Started listening to Stereolab’s Cobra Versus Phases album in the car. Not sure what prompted it. Famously it got a score of zero in a review on the old NME magazine. It’s certainly challenging and sometimes frustrating, but it’s not a zero! Maybe ungainly might be the right word; like the album title, the full version of which is Cobra Verses Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night. Phew! I really like the songs People Do It All the Time, The Free Design, Infinity Girl, The Spiracles, Caleidoscopic Gaze, Strobo Acceleration and Come and Play in the Milky Night. I’m definitely warming to the gentle and downbeat Velvet Water, but I still struggle with Blue Milk, a long, two-note meditation with a fast bit at the end. The live version is so much better (see below).
After finishing the Cobra album, I put on a Stereolab Live concert I have in the car. This was from a concert in 2001 at Melbourne’s The Forum that I recorded off a live broadcast by radio station 3PBS. I actually went to the concert hoping to get in, but I didn’t have tickets and it was sold out. So it was nice to be able to hear it later on the radio. I remember I also went to Fitzroy that day and bought a copy of their Dots and Loops album as a kind of consolation prize. Sounds like it was a good gig. They featured much of the Cobras album, which was out at the time. I was especially blown away by the new song, Escape Pod, with its frantic vocals and swirling keyboards. But best of all was their live rendition of Blue Milk, a song from the Cobras album that was long and strange and unsatisfying on that album. But the live version is an amazing revelation. The long slow section at the start just makes sense, and when it gets ‘fast’ at the end, vocalist Laetitia lets rip with some howls and yelps (not on the album version) that really give it oomph. Sounds very punky. It’s like they got it right here with a definitive version. I love it when bands and artists do that – rework an unsatisfying studio song to make it a very satisfying live song. After that, Laetitia says, very cool, ‘Now that we’re all relaxed, we can rock.’ A line I always hear as ‘we can le Rock’. It must be her French accent. Then it’s indeed the very rocking Seeming and the Meaning, then an encore of Stars That Play in the Milky Night which is cut short by the radio broadcast.