Oh I agree, it is very hard to go past Stella in terms of quality & originality.
For me there's been a change in their work that began around the time of Zebra where they began sounding less inventive and more mainstream. Toy and Point haven't really fired my imagination like their earlier work did, but considering Dieter & Boris are now in their 70s I find it inspiring they're still making very modern-sounding music.
For those interested, Boris wrote the score for the japanese anime Space Adventure Cobra which features many of the best songs from their earlier era. I sometimes wonder if someone of his musical talents could have alternatively gone down the path of film composer and what would've become of it.
What I found with Zebra is somehow it was almost top loaded as far as the bass quality. The first 3/4 was superior bass quality?
Stella still has an amazing quality to me. Actually https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Gotta_Say_Yes_to_Another_Excess was my gateway tape of them around 1982. Then I purchased Stella when it came out in 1985. So who knows why, but Stella has many memories for me. Being in College was a great time and Stella was an album that I played over and over. I would end up finding a couple records in the 1990s from them but they never topped Stella to me. Just the way they did the reverb is amazing.
I remember reading about their technical aspects in a music production magazine and it’s safe to say that every album had different production. The miles of cables and bizarre effects seem to be unique to every production? At least to me they are different.
Pocket Universe and Motion Picture I don’t have but do have experience hearing. I need reintroduce myself to them?
Touch Yello, Toy and The Eye are well done, at least to my ears. There is nothing out there that has their sound?
I remember listening to a remastered version of You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess at one point and finding it compared unfavorably to the original, and actually that's generally been my finding when it comes to Yellow re-issues. More compression and less dynamic range. I would love it if they re-released the originals in hi-res, as only Toy & Point have 24bit versions, in fact I've compared both with their 44khz counterparts and found them to be marginal improvements. 24-192 Stella would be a treat.
The Touch Yello Deluxe version does have some nice additional remixes on it and I generally enjoy Yello remixes in general. Hands on Yello has some nice variations.
I'm a bit late to the party, having only discovered this album last week! Buying as opposed to streaming music has become something out of the ordinary, but I bought my copy today and have spent a few hours gathering initial impressions.
Having access to some of the older tracks in 24 bit is tremendous and whatever process they used to remaster or remix has allowed them to blend the old in with the newer songs much more seamlessly than I expected. There's still obvious differences in styles (that's the beauty of Yello) but you can see how their later work has remained faithful to the spirit of the earlier tracks despite sounding more edgy & modern.
Overall its a much hotter album in terms of loudness than the earlier stuff, which could perhaps be fatiguing on the wrong system. Nonetheless I'm impressed with the way they've melded their varied catalogue together, some of the older songs feel rejuvenated and having so much music from vastly different eras presented as a whole makes me appreciate the remarkable richness of Boris' sonic palette. Nobody creates atomosphere like Yello.
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