Stereolab
Days passed without the appearance of Physical Graffiti. Then the first shipment arrived late one Thursday. The fans descended on Marty’s Records downstairs from CREEM like dragonflies, clustered around the cash register, furtively clutching the album to their heaving bosoms, slobbering and drooling down the shrinkwrap. Worried parents contemplated a vaccine, but once Physical Graffiti touched the turntables the mysterious malady subsided. The stricken nodules were lulled into a state of tympanic euphoria.
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Before rock, the LP was primarily marketed to adults, offering them programs of mood music–the kind of stuff Stereolab loves to play with. In the 60s records were stacked six deep on the spindles of record changers, providing hours of uninterrupted background music for cocktail parties. But album-oriented rock found a younger, larger, and more enthusiastic market for LPs, and by the end of the decade bands like the Who and the Kinks, who’d come up on the strength of singles, became genuine rock stars by concentrating on producing coherent albums. Zeppelin, just starting out at the time, would go on to produce five number one LPs, but their most famous song, “Stairway to Heaven,” was never even released as a single. By 1975, manual turntable sales were increasing at four times the rate of record changer sales, according to a Pioneer ad that ran in Crawdaddy! at the time. The rock generation was distinguishing itself by sitting down and listening to records with the sort of attention normally reserved for television or film.
No pop group sounds more at home in this context than Stereolab, which has been associated with the phrase “space-age bachelor-pad music” since at least 1993–though ironically the band members are notorious record obsessives. The group’s name was lifted from a series of hi-fi records issued in the late 50s by the Vanguard label. The title of the third cut on Cobra, “The Free Design,” pays homage to an obscure, saccharine vocal group of the 60s whose harmonies at times bear a striking resemblance to Stereolab’s. Stereolab expresses its vinyl fetish by releasing its music on the LP format (often with geeky extra attention to packaging detail, like colored vinyl or gorgeous gatefold sleeves) and issuing 45s and even ten-inch EPs both between albums and in promotion of them. But these are often limited editions, and CD sales almost certainly must compensate for the expense.
