It's New to Me: Aluminum Tunes by Stereolab (1998)

A sampling of merchandise from a catalog of bank, office, and library chairs, 1910

Aluminum Tunes is subtitled Switched On Volume 3 - it's the third in a series of collection of Stereolab's stray singles, EPs, and rarities. This installment was a two-disc set covering '94 to '97 (the Mars Audiac/Emperor Tomato/Dots Loops era) - I've had good luck with the first two Switched On collections (which, in the case of Stereolab, means that they did not cause me to fall into a Socialist-lounge-music coma).

I was immediately disappointed with Aluminum Tunes, though, because of the terrible packaging. It's not a collection that's too easy to find these days, and the packaging is such that any used copy is going to be pretty well mangled. It's a foldover cardboard digi-pak type thing, but the spindles holding the discs in place are little columns of cardboard. Over time, these little columns can easily get squished down so that the discs just fall right out of the "case" - it was hopeless trying to keep the discs in place in the copy I ordered off Amazon (the first disc also had major scratches, probably from falling out of the case). The day after I bought the thing, I was trying to put one of the discs back into its little cardboard tray and I must have pushed down a little too hard - the disc snapped in half. Ugh.

But enough about the terrible packaging - what about the music on Aluminum Tunes? Compared to the earlier Switched On collections, it's a little boring, to be frank. Both discs have vocal-track-to-instrumental ratio problems, and I think you're just daring your fans to turn on you if you name a nine-minute track "One Note Samba". Nonetheless, there are some great Stereolab tunes in here, particularly the tracks from the much-sought-after Music for the Amorphous Body Study Center and Laminations EPs - my favorite is probably "One Small Step", the track that ends the first Aluminum Tunes disc. It may sound particularly good in the context of that disc, being a very direct and melodic song coming after diffuse and abstract pieces like "Speedy Car" and "Ulan Bator", but I think that the circular melody and odd post-apocalyptic lyric stand pretty well on their own as well.

"One Small Step" by Stereolab