Astronaughts are here to thrash your brains out of your skull with a yelp of fuzzy feedback. Every track on this album boasts just the right amount of graininess to induce instant nostalgia. Not the sentimental sort, mind you — more like the texture of smutty ’80s Richard Kern films. Dilapidated just enough that the dirt shines through to its endearingly adolescent scum surface.
You can hear the heavenly bodies going through puberty on this one, each pimple erupting in an off-beat lyric or greasy riff. This isn’t saying that the jams on this release are juvenile. They’re just not in their mid-forties with day jobs and comb-overs. The chords are still rampant and undomesticated, the harmonizations are clearly performed by ravenous dogs and the distortion couldn’t come from anything less than a silver rocket being shoved off to Mars.
Not only are Astronaughts interplanetary, they’re also local, signed with Dover’s independent record label Mewn Wrox. Astronaughts are proud comrades of the Mewnian armada, and no strangers to prior musical ventures — two-thirds of the members are from State Bird, who played Midwest Fest last year. Some have even been brazen enough to call them State Bird 2.0, saying that they’ve picked up where SB left off.
This album is certainly its own entity, though; the proof is how it crawls into your cranium and sinks its teeth into your cortex for just over 20 minutes. Once you pick it up, it won’t let you down, clown. Download it free at astronaughts.bandcamp.com.
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