Stella (album)
| Stella | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
||||
| Studio album by Yello | ||||
| Released | 29 January 1985 | |||
| Recorded | 1983–1984 at Yello Studio, Zurich | |||
| Genre | Synthpop | |||
| Length | 40:58 | |||
| Label |
Vertigo (Europe) Elektra (UK) Mercury (US) |
|||
| Producer | Yello | |||
| Yello chronology | ||||
|
||||
| Singles from Stella | ||||
|
||||
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
| Melody Maker | average |
| Mojo |
 (2005 reissue) |
| Record Mirror | |
| Sounds | |
Stella is the fourth studio album by the Swiss electronic band Yello, first released in Germany, Switzerland and Austria on 29 January 1985, and in the UK and US in March 1985. It was the first album made by the band without founder member Carlos Perón, and with his departure the remaining duo of Boris Blank and Dieter Meier began to move away from experimental electronic sounds towards a more commercial synthpop and cinematic soundtrack style. As well as becoming the first album ever by a Swiss group to top the Swiss album chart, it was the band's breakthrough album internationally, helped by the success of the song "Oh Yeah", which gained the band worldwide attention the following year after it was prominently featured in the 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off and then a year later in The Secret of My Success.
Recording took place from mid-1983 to mid-1984 at the band's Yello Studio on the shore of Lake Zurich. Blank had purchased two new synthesizers in 1983, a Yamaha DX7 and a Roland JX-3P, but the album was mostly written and created using the equipment he already owned, a Fairlight CMI Series II sampler along with an ARP Odyssey synthesizer, the Linn LM-1 and Oberheim DMX drum machines, a Roland VP-330 Vocoder Plus, a Lexicon Hall reverb unit and a Framus guitar.
With the album ready to be mixed, Yello decided to try the new digital mixing process instead of the standard analogue process, and in August 1984 they visited Hartmann Digital Studio in Nuremberg where engineer Tom Thiel began mixing the album. However, Yello abruptly cancelled the sessions after just ten days, unhappy with the sound of the album. Meier explained that the duo felt that the songs were losing their soul, saying, "Getting technically more experienced was leading us onto a slick perfectionist track. We even went to a German digital studio to do the most perfect remixes on a digital machine with the SSL Desk and the rest of it. And we had to learn, a difficult process for us, that perfection is just a way to escape from having nothing to say... With Stella we were being dragged down by an excess of perfection." Blank later said, "All the balances were wrong and the dynamic was lost, so I did lots of remixes again in Zurich to save this album". The group returned to their studios in Zurich and Blank started the process of remixing the tracks himself, with the exception of "Desert Inn" which he felt was acceptable as it was, "Blue Nabou" which the duo had already decided would not appear on the album and hence there was no urgency to improve it, and "Angel No" because Blank did not have time to mix it to the standard that he wanted. With the delay in mixing, the album's provisional release date of 1 October 1984 could not be met, and in order to avoid being lost among the Christmas releases, a new release date in January 1985 was set.
...
Wikipedia