Stereolab have been a terrific band. In the early 90s-- when "post-rock" meant English people moving past shoegazing into ambient and dub-- they caromed into view on a buzzy organ-and-guitar rush, droning joyously into a frenzy as poppy as it was driving. By the late 90s-- when "post-rock" meant Chicagoans with jazz ambitions going nuts with the vibraphones-- their tight drones had opened up into a fascinating grab-bag of swingy lounge and spacy pop, much of which was as terrifically conceived as anything else that decade. Some naysayers like to point out that they sounded like the metronomic grooves of Neu!, but they just as often sounded like Faust, the hyper Parisian pop of France Gall, the loungy exotica of Martin Denny, the bloopy Moog-music of Jean-Jacques Perry, or any of the dozen other acts whose reissues they laid some groundwork for. Which was exactly why naysayers liked to claim the band had more depth to their record collections than their songs. But if the reams of fresh ideas on their best albums weren't enough proof to the contrary, ABC Music-- nearly the entire Stereolab career captured in BBC radio sessions-- stands to close the issue.

The run of sessions presented on this two-disc collection is broad, stretching from 1991 to 2001 and covering every major phase of the band's progression over its 32 tracks. As such, it's hard not to get a little nostalgic, to start mentally mapping the Complete History of Stereolab, for old hands and newcomers alike:

The Earliest Days. Represented here by two Peel Sessions from 1991 and 1992. Stereolab's appearance was a revelation, and that's just how this compilation kicks off: with a quick, blurry run through the anthemic bounce of "Super Electric", which starts off droning and doesn't stop until you've had enough. Maybe it was the purposeful hum of Tim Gane's guitar or the matter-of-fact melodies of Laetitia Sadier, but Stereolab always came out sounding like they were leading some sort of stirring revolutionary march through your headspace, Sadier playing Eponine in a future moon-version of Les Miserables. There's the contemplative jangle of "Changer" as well as the slow harmonic shifts of "Doubt" (another hymn), but my personal favorites from this batch come with the wrecking pulse of "John Cage Bubblegum"-- a shifting collage of melodic mantras over an unstoppable charge-- and the wistful abandon of "Peng 33" where Sadier enthuses about the world's possibilities over a weirdly heartbreaking chord pattern; the fact that her lyrics are mostly paraphrasing from the opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude actually makes it better.

The Early Middle Period. These heavily-represented days saw the Lab's drones go from a lo-fi rush to more varied and concrete forms-- the first high-water mark of the Stereolab Can Do No Wrong era-- and appropriately, the set leads with "Wow and Flutter", from their longest, sleepiest, outer-spaciest record, Mars Audiac Quintet. Soon after, we come to the single "French Disko", which had the band summarizing its entire early charge into one pitch-perfect pop moment; "La Resistance!" they cheer, confirming that revolutionary-anthem impression. "Lo Boob Oscillator", one of their earliest pretty-swing excursions, has Mary Hansen and future Snowpony frontwoman Katharine Gifford doing 50s harmonies while Sadier paints pictures of the moon drifting freely here and there; "Golden Ball", unfortunately, stands as the only representative of Transient Random Noise-Bursts with Announcements, the Lab's darkest and most disorienting and grotty record. I wish they'd done "Crest", but I also wish Sadier had a stronger voice, as she struggles to be heard all through these sessions. Still, this is the Stereolab that switched people on, and it's on lovely display here.

The Late Middle Period. This is where the beauty of ABC Music is unveiled. Stereolab's records completed a long-term turn they'd been taking since the mid-90s, from a straight-up band-in-a-room feel to a focus on studio-assisted pop experiments. The beauty of seeing Stereolab live, however, was discovering how much of their signature sound was really just down to them: from beginning to end, and through a cavalcade of new rhythm sections and sidemen, they were always at heart a tight little pop combo, and one that could swing and groove as easily as it could rev up the organ buzz. The sessions from this period start off with the track that just might be the high point of their recording history: a slow-mounting groove called "Metronomic Underground", from Emperor Tomato Ketchup, which reveals itself as every bit as band-in-a-room as their first singles-- the trick, for anyone who hasn't noticed, wasn't that Stereolab had some insane recording budget, but that they actually constructed songs that sounded massively interesting. This impression's only reinforced by the other tracks from Emperor Tomato Ketchup, without doubt the pinnacle of Stereolab as the architects of fascinating song-machines: the odd back-and-forth off-rhythm of "Tomorrow Is Already Here" and the peppy bubbling of "Les Yper-Sound" become clearer revelations the more you can hear the band actually playing them, and the gorgeous swooning of personal-favorite "Slow Fast Hazel", with its gently revolving bass and watery guitar breaks, is one of the finest things here.

The Late Period. One popular music-geek game is the one that goes When Did This Band Stop Being Good, a mental diversion pretty much everyone with any interest in R.E.M. has spent some time on. This game gets played a lot with Stereolab, with the biggest point of contention among moderates being whether Dots and Loops-- the most plainly and deliberately "post-rock" of Stereolab's albums-- was a well-formed flagship of the era or the point where Stereolab gave up. Dots and Loops is not represented at all on this collection; neither is Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, which most everyone agrees was the Lab's first truly bad record, by-numbers to the point of self-parody. The band were mostly just unlucky: they released their first flop right at the moment when listeners were starting to move on anyway, and their passable return-to-form Sound-Dust was followed by the hugely tragic death of key member Mary Hansen. Sound-Dust is represented here by four tracks from a 2001 session, all of which-- surprisingly for those like me, who'd started shaking their heads around Cobra-- sound great, if sometimes a bit too "easy."

As a Smiths-obsessed teenager, I played that band's albums to death, meaning my later Smiths listening always revolved around the less mediated perspectives of radio sessions and live recordings. The Stereolab-in-a-box on offer here has the potential to turn into the same for me: they play plenty of non-album songs throughout, the most fascinating being the EP track "Pinball", originally titled "Heavenly Van Halen" most likely because it sounds sort of like Heavenly, and sort of like Van Halen. The groop sounds great and tight and, well, the slightest bit different, exposing how they functioned when scaled down to just instruments in a room. It's a rich and pretty glorious history. Far be it from me to go writing epitaphs for Stereolab already, but: it's been wonderful.

-Nitsuh Abebe, May 5th, 2003