THE FRAGILE DEFENSE OF WORDS

When I saw that the title of the next Stereolab disc was going to be Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, well, first I laughed a little. Then I grew concerned…

This seemed a symptom of some of the less-attractive Decision Rock impulses run amok. Dots and Loops had been clean, like its title, and green, like its cover. But this title bespoke an apparent lack of focus. The cover, a muddy brown plate interrupted by several swiping wisps of orange electronic smoke, did nothing to dissuade me from this notion.

This marked the first point in my cycle of obsession where I began to question my faith, as it were. I overcorrected initially, and couldn’t warm to Cobra and Phases at all.

As time passed, its merits became clearer, as did its faults.

Chief among its faults is that the thing is too damn long. Just because a CD makes 78 minutes available to you doesn’t mean you have to threaten to use them all. A couple of months after it was released, I burned a new version that shaved off about 20 minutes by dropping two songs.

Blue Milk is the kind of song that would have been better served as a tour single or some other breed of limited release; Caleidoscopic Gaze would be a bore at any length, but is an insufferable bore at 8:09.

So, the ground rules had changed. Stereolab was making me work for my pleasure, and with Cobra and Phases it was worth the effort in the end. But where would we go from here?