It’s hard to distill Stereolab’s history into a set of releases—between EPs, singles and compilations, there’s probably more Stereolab material that doesn’t fit into the context of an album than material that does—but if we’re strictly talking album output, I actually came to Stereolab a little less than halfway through their career. This is staggering when you consider that most critics tend to divide the band’s history into a pre-Emperor Tomato Ketchup period and a post-Emperor period. The former is marked by drone-like rock compositions peppered liberally with Farfisas and assorted vintage accouterments; the latter has been described disparagingly as easy-listening AM radio free jazz lite. Some old-school Stereolab fans consider the likes of Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night as latter-day abominations that saw the Groop fall too much in love with the retro jazz-pop sounds they were playing around with earlier in their career, and it’s hard to deny that there isn’t a sense of complacency in the band’s later work. Saying every Stereolab album sounded the same was never a particularly risky position to take.

As someone who only really became a Stereolab fan with Dots and Loops, then, I’ve had the dubious fortune of sticking around for the majority of the band’s album output—but at the same time only hearing them “after the fall,” so to speak. Which isn’t to say I don’t love the band anyways, curmudgeons be damned; but even I have to admit that Stereolab’s uniquely chipper sound loses its charm after years of minor variations. So after Margerine Eclipse, an album I never bought but heard a couple of times, I officially exited the land of Stereolab and struck out for greener pastures.

If all goes well, however, 2008 could be the year Stereolab returns with a bang. You see, since Margerine Eclipse—the band’s first album without the late Mary Hansen, who was killed when a truck collided with her bike in 2002—Stereolab has also been mostly quiet. Fab Four Suture came out in 2006, but is best described as a compilation of prior EPs rather than an album proper; other than those six singles, there’s been little coming out of the Stereolab camp. If you’re willing to stretch your imagination a little (and I mean just a little), though, Stereolab have never really left; the Groop’s spirit has just jumped ship temporarily to Monade.

Stereolab singer’s Laetitia Sadier’s solo project started in the late 90s but didn’t release an album until 2003—probably because at that point Monade was still little more than Sadier’s home recordings. By 2005 and A Few Steps More, Monade looked a lot more like a real band. That band, though it shares no members with Stereolab besides Sadier, sounds a whole lot like the Groop, making A Few Steps More a bit like an alternate universe Stereolab album. Aside from compositional differences that may or may not reveal themselves in casual listening, Monade have been able to get away with sounding like Stereolab partially because Stereolab have been mostly dormant as of late.

Expectations will be different for Monade’s third album, Monstre Cosmic, however. Due out today, Monstre Cosmic will no longer have the playing field all to themselves; latest word from the Stereolab camp is that they plan to release an actual album this year. Not that the two bands are exactly competing against each other, but Monade may have an edge here: “Regarde” seems to follow the general Monade trend of sounding a lot like Stereolab minus the hermetically sealed atmosphere that occasionally suffocated the former’s sound. Perhaps even with Stereolab re-entering the picture, the future may still belong to Sadier solo, instead of Sadier and Gane. Stay tuned.

Thanks to Saint Etienne’s recent fanclub-only limited edition boxset release, I now own almost eight solid hours of Saint Etienne music. Not a full day’s worth of pop pleasure, sure, but more music than any other artist in my collection—by quite a wide margin if you include all the stuff I don’t have on CD but have, erm, acquired by other means. (Hey, you try tracking down an inexpensive copy of The Misadventures of Saint Etienne. It took me a year to finally justify the purchase of the only Japanese album I own.) Boxette contributes a solid two and a half hours’ worth of material to my collection alone. Considering that it cost me about $55 CAD when all is said and done, that’s not too bad. But I almost didn’t pick it up.

Last year, Saint Etienne and I had a bit of a falling out. Still giddy off my new fanclub membership (which, granted, consisted of me signing up on a web form and receiving an e-mail, but hey), I proceeded to buy all the fanclub-only releases I could get my hands on. It had been a year and a half since Tales From Turnpike House and the desire for new material couldn’t be silenced. Generally speaking, the veteran British pop group have been quite good with b-sides; the Way Out West mix of “Angel,” “Stormtrooper in Drag” and Misadventures‘ “The Way I Fell For You” are some of the band’s best songs, and you won’t find any of them on any of their proper albums. But the 2007 crop of fanclub releases had me rethinking this stance. Nice Price was nice enough, but because it consisted entirely of outtakes and alternates of songs we’ve already heard, it wasn’t exactly new material. And as soundtrack albums go, What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? isn’t bad or anything, but it’s definitely no Misadventures and it’s almost completely bereft of Sarah Cracknell’s vocals. Plus the main theme of the movie is repeated three or four times in various guises. In the end, it’s less than essential listening for anyone but the most diehard Etienne fan or soundtrack aficionado.

So dropping $55 on a limited-edition boxset did not exactly seem like the best idea come Christmas time, especially after a bevy of large purchases that had critically wounded my savings account. But the band kept sending e-mails: “hey, um, sorry about the delays, we’re having troubles with the store because of the demand” and “ack, shipping delays, we’re really sorry, the early orders will go out soon,” and “another delay, really sorry but the packaging’s mucked things up, there’s only a few sets left so act quickly.” In the end, I caved, and a week and a half ago I received my shiny white Boxette: 2975/3000. Boy is that ever cutting it close.

And my goodness is it ever fantastic. Though three of the set’s four discs are remastered versions of old fanclub albums, I’d never heard any of them, so they all sounded new to me. And unlike the band’s studio albums, which all stand very well on their own as self-contained entities with purpose and progression, Boxette largely feels like the musical equivalent of one of my favourite lines from “Finisterre”: “I like the feeling of being slightly lost.” Built on Sand and I Love to Paint in particular are infused with a sense of pleasant aimlessness, like one long string of tangent after tangent. Asleep at the Wheels of Steel is a bit like the downbeat depressive of the group, but new disc Eric Random wraps things up nicely with a mix of unreleased material and fanclub EP tracks.

I’m pretty sure the first two discs are my favourite but haven’t quite decided which one. Early-era disc I Love to Paint splits its time between misfit dance-pop diamonds in the rough like “Everything I Touch Turns to Gold” and “Flight to Tashkent,” and breezy electronic instrumentals like “Fife Coast” and “Schroeder.” Built on Sand, compiled during the lead-up to 2000’s Sound of Water, leans more towards a mix of darker instrumentals from the band’s so-called “wilderness years” and more organic material that wouldn’t sound out of place on Good Humor, Fairfax High or Misadventures of Saint Etienne (and indeed, were recorded for and left off Misadventures). There are gems all over the set, though—even one or two on Asleep at the Wheels of Steel—and overall it’s hard to believe that I almost missed out.

Of course, if you’re reading this and you don’t already have a copy yourself, then you definitely have missed out; as you might’ve gathered from the number on my boxset, Boxette is sold out. But apparently Saint Etienne have plans to remaster and re-release all their old albums in expanded form, with extra b-sides and whatnot attached, plus another greatest hits with “This is Tomorrow” attached as a single. Oh, and there may or may not be a secret project in the works. Really, it all sounds like a smashing year—now, if only the band would get back in the studio and record an actual album…

Most bands that manage to become media sweethearts for a week or a month—you know, bands that pop up out of nowhere with reviews and bon mots all over the place—usually get filed under “stop paying attention because they are worthless.” As an example, this pile is where I’m keeping Vampire Weekend until someone manages to write a review of the band that doesn’t include the term “afro-centric.” Seriously, where the fuck did they come from and why am I seeing them everywhere all of a sudden? Such overnight success is suspicious to say the least.

But sometimes I hear just enough interesting tidbits about someone to keep them just on the edge of my radar. If I keep hearing little things here and there that sound vaguely interesting, I might even graduate them to “cautiously optimistic.” This is where Annie Clark, the mastermind behind St. Vincent, sat in my mental framework by the time I’d actually gotten around to listening to the title track off her first album, Marry Me. Having since concocted a whole music video in my head for the song, I think it’s safe to say that St. Vincent is one of the very few artists that managed to survive the initial flurry of offputting hype and actually make it into my record collection, and possibly my heart.

Marry Me appeals for several reasons, not the least of which is that she outdoes Feist in the charismatic singer-songwriter sweepstakes of 2007 by virtue of being more interesting; where The Reminder was shockingly pretty but felt a bit like treading water, Marry Me is more dynamic and varied. But I think the biggest reason why I like this album is Clark’s penchant for playful throwaway lyrics. You may or may not already know that I’m pretty horrible when it comes to hearing lyrics in music, let alone remembering lyrics, let alone analyzing them and figuring out a song’s meaning (”wait, Jack and Diane is about a couple named Jack and Diane? No, really, I had no idea! I just clapped along when I heard handclaps!”).

But Marry Me is full of choice quotations so insistent that they’ve infiltrated even my thick skull, from “Now, Now”’s “you don’t mean that / say you’re sorry” to “Your Lips Are Red”’s “My face is drawn / My face is drawn on with this number 2 pencil” to “Marry Me”’s often-cited “Marry me, John I’ll be so good to you / You won’t realize I’m gone.” And though I haven’t really been able to figure out what it means, the chorus to “The Apocalypse Song” has burned itself permanently into my head: “It’s time / you are light / I guess you are afraid of what everyone is made of.”