Oscillons From the Anti Sun
When you're a prolific band that also happens to be mighty friendly to your obsessive compulsive collector fan base, you wind up releasing a lot of singles and EPs with material that's otherwise unavailable on your albums. And here, for the price of a Japanese pressing of theFluorescencesEP on an auction site alone, you get Stereolab's eight Elektra EPs, from 1993'sJenny Ondiolineto 2001'sCaptain Easychord. The "groop"'s collaborative EPs (Crumb Duck,Uilab) are not included, but there is a DVD with rarely-seen videos and television performances. This box set serves far more than a plug-the-gaps exercise for trainspotters; as with the singles collectionsSwitched-Onvolumesone,twoandthree(did we not mention this band is prolific?), it's an intriguing retrospective of the band in their mature years. And unlike those comps, this set often highlights the band's more lengthy, experimental songs. "Les Yper Yper Sound," for instance,John McEntire's distorted, delightfully repetitious reworking of "Yper Sound" fromEmperor Tomato Ketchup, is spine-tinglingly awesome.--Mike McGonigal