Stereolab - Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night (3LP)

Pulling this one off the shelf still feels like a small event. Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night landed in 1999, right as Stereolab were leaning deepest into their lush, proggy side, and it remains a curious pleasure to sink into. The core chemistry is in full swing here. Tim Gane’s cycling guitar figures and analogue synths, Laetitia Sadier’s cool, precise voice, and the late Mary Hansen’s harmonies create the familiar motorik glide, but the palette is richer and stranger. With John McEntire and Jim O’Rourke guiding the sessions in Chicago at Soma Electronic Music Studios, the group stitched jazz voicings, musique concrète touches and vibraphone sparkle into their retrofuturist pop in a way that felt both heady and playful.

You hear that ambition straight away in the way horns and strings thread through the album without grandstanding. Arrangements bloom, then slip away before they overstay. The writing is meticulous but never rigid, so a song can pivot from a soft-focus bossa sway to a pulsing, almost laboratory-clean groove and it just makes sense. “The Free Design” is the obvious in, a buoyant single with a melody that sticks and a title that nods to the cult sunshine pop group. It’s the band’s knack for finding utopian light inside a maze of odd time signatures and analogue gear, delivered with a grin.

Then there’s “Blue Milk,” which remains the record’s most hypnotic provocation. It stretches past the 11-minute mark and turns repetition into a hall of mirrors, tones folding back on themselves until you start noticing tiny shifts in grain and colour. It’s not background drift so much as slow-motion architecture. Put it on at volume and the room changes shape. Elsewhere, pieces like “Puncture in the Radax Permutation” and “Italian Shoes Continuum” lean into tumbling rhythms and pointillist keys, all those Moogs, Farfisas and mallet instruments interlocking with a drummer’s sense of swing. The band never chases a conventional chorus just to settle a song. They prefer tension that coils and releases like a spring.

Sadier’s lyrics continue to glance off politics and power structures with clipped poise. She never sermonises. Instead, slogans dissolve into mantra, then back into melody. That approach suits the record’s texture-first mindset. Even when a line snaps into focus, the arrangement keeps nudging you toward the details, a flute that flickers at the edge or a bass run that briefly steals the spotlight.

At the time, some critics wanted something brasher after the cult success of Emperor Tomato Ketchup and the pop-forward charm of Dots and Loops, and the reception could be prickly. Over the years the mood has softened. The band’s reissue campaign brought a careful remaster and a stack of demos that helped listeners hear the internal logic at work here, and outlets that once shrugged gave it a warmer welcome. It turns out Cobra wasn’t a cul-de-sac. It was Stereolab taking their motorik-pop language and bending it toward chamber jazz and electro-acoustic collage, an approach they would refine again on Sound-Dust.

On vinyl the album breathes the way it’s meant to. The sprawling double LP spread gives the low end room, and the percussion has that woody, tactile snap you want from this band. If you’ve only streamed it, hunting down Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night vinyl is worth it for “Blue Milk” alone, which settles into a deeper pocket on wax. As with most Stereolab vinyl, quiet pressings matter because so much magic happens in the margins, and this record is full of margins.

If you’re crate-digging in a Melbourne record store and spot it, grab first, debate later. Copies don’t linger. For those who buy Stereolab records online, recent reissues make it easier to find a clean set without remortgaging the house, and they sit nicely alongside other Stereolab albums on vinyl if you’re building the shelf out from Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements through to Not Music. It’s a good one to pull out when you’re showing a curious mate how deep this band’s catalogue runs, and it slots neatly into any well-loved stack of vinyl records Australia has to offer.

Cobra is not the instant hit-maker in their discography, but it’s the album that rewards a long weekend and a decent sound system. Put it on, let those oscillators purr, and remember how rare it is for a group to make experimental music feel this inviting.