I’ve never quite known what to make of Stereolab. I first heard them when I was getting deep into indie pop — probably the year 2001, if I had to guess, but it could have been earlier or later by a year or two. At this point in my life, looking that far back is sometimes hard. Not, like, emotionally hard. Just difficult. I try to put pins in my life around certain events — that tends to help remembering when things happen. I always remember when I started at my last job, because it was the year Real Salt Lake last made a final.
None of that really has to do with Stereolab, who, by this point, have three albums to their name. Mars Audiac Quintet (1994) is the most sonically familiar, but despite being packed with lovely chamber pop experimentation, it’s just a presage of what came in 1996 with Emperor Tomato Ketchup.
“Metronomic Underground” is nearly eight minutes long, and there’s shockingly little variation in the song. It feels straight out of 1996, I think. It’s equally a song that feels like it’s from outer space, which Stereolab can always achieve. That it opens Emperor Tomato Ketchup, arguably the band’s best-regarded effort, is remarkable. It’s long, drawn out, and it doesn’t even fit the sonic profile of the rest of the album. The second track, “Cybele’s Reverie” is a string-heavy chamber pop song that breaks out of the spell cast by the opener.
And just like that, “Percolator” is back to a tight, rhythmic sound. Then “Les Yper-Sound” loosens up, and you’re swaying again. That’s the whole album, that back-and-forth. When it’s not from song-to-song, it’s within a song. When Stereolab deprioritizes vocals, the almost-but-not-quite straightforward pop strains of songs like “The Noise of Carpet” pull things back into a more accessible zone. “Monster Sacre” takes that and slows things down.
Emperor Tomato Ketchup isn’t some album that holds deep emotional resonance with me. I don’t know. It’s good! I really like it. I mean, it’s my 21st top album of the 1990s. I think it maybe deserves to be even higher, though you can’t ask me to kick off several of these albums. In fact, I think the first Stereolab album that really holds emotional resonance for me is their latest ,Instant Holograms on Metal Film, and that’s because my older son really got into the album when they first started hitting SiriusXM. He listened to a lot of great music that way. Hearing the first three tracks never fails to bring a smile.
But if Stereolab’s music — and they had a bunch of great music in the 1990s; it’s not just this one landmark album; it’s more stand-in for Stereolab writ large — it does always transport me back to those first listens. Maybe that’s deep emotional resonance. I don’t know.