GOD IS AN ASTRONAUT

I like to listen to this a lot, but then it's a style that I like a lot generally. Maybe also a good album for people who want to know what post rock is, just the genre mainstream, that is, nothing that expands the limits or something. I know a good number of GIAA albums and I can say similar things about all of them. This one has somewhat more variety compared to what else I know, which is of course good (but non-essential).

From the beginning of the first track "Adrift" straight drumming and uplifting guitar riffs on up-tempo melodic / rhythmic lines and chilling vibes are incredibly impressive. Complicated repetitive phrases full of delicate but massive instrumental potentiality should be intensively breaking into our brain. "In Flux" gets started with monotonous dissonance, that reminds me of the similarity to Zodiac by Mittelwinternacht '71. But in the middle part kicking movements and loud guitar-oriented sound explosion attack us again and again. The last lingering fuzz catches our heart strictly. "Fade" is quite speedy, winding psychedelia  regardless of its title. They would encourage the audience and themselves in this impressive sound manner.

On the contrary, "Burial" has quite melancholy and mind instability through the appearance. Dreamy melody lines and flavourful rhythm bases like Japanese folk, or Enka, relax us leisurely, but fuzzy evocative developments in the middle part lift us up on the top of the mountain. Wonderful is such a sound contrast or gap. "Barren Trees" is another comfortable, acceptable one. We the audience concerned under no good circumstances would be relieved by this fascinating, magnificent dramatic song getting to our heart. And the last acoustic gem "Luminous Waves" is digested into our stomach pretty smoothly and eases our mind deeply in our inner space. Safe and sound, they will give us via the brilliant crystal.

Just a remark: this album sounds like a glass of Irish whiskey with delicate palate and powerful aftertaste. Good.

GOD IS AN ASTRONAUT has become a fairly well known post-rock band since the mid-2000s but in the beginning the band sounded a lot different. THE END OF THE BEGINNING firmly sits in the post-rock camp but at this point these guys were a bit eclectic with many layers of space rock, shoegaze inspired walls of sound and more trip hop and downtempo chilled out percussive beats. While many post-rock albums can sound rather monotonous as they tend to be quite lengthy, THE END OF THE BEGINNING is quite diverse in the tones, timbres, dynamics and tempos. The most notable part about this debut release is how thick the atmospheres are with a tapestry of synthesizer layers.

While the title track and following "Lost Symphony" and "Twilight" are rather mellowed out, the track "Fall From The Stars" on the other hand sounds more like a early U2 post-punk track which just happened to fall in love with the atmospheric textures of 70s Krautrock and progressive electronic as heard from Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze. While post-rock generally strives to create some ethereal astral plane of sound, THE END OF THE BEGINNING stays within the confines of a general rock paradigm. Not that there are choruses and verses but the bass grooves and guitar riffs are much more traditional rock than post-rock but overall the album comes off as some sort of electronic album that incorporates some rock instrumentation much like the space rock of Ozric Tentacles without the hyperactivity.

Tracks like "Coda" seem like they stray out of post-rock altogether with funky bass grooves and melodic call and response synthesized layers of sound with processed lyrics reminding me of artists like the French band Air. Same goes for "Route 666." While the album starts out fairly interesting it suffers the same fate as many post-rock albums and becomes monotonous 3/4 of the way through. Add to that the trip hop beats get tiresome after a while and tracks like "Coda" only prove that the duo could've thrown a little more creativity into the mix. All in all, this is a decent debut but hardly stands out as one of the most essential moments in post-rock history. GOD may be AN ASTRONAUT but clearly needs a little more space travel before true cosmic inspiration sets in. As a trio GOD IS AN ASTRONAUT would take on a more traditional post-rock style but on this one it's fairly unique. I just wish it was a bit more creative.

I can't really compare this record to anything by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, because there is so much more depth in anything that GY!BE has done. The shortness of the tracks here makes certain that there are no epics on the album, just mostly basic instrumentals that feel like they could be epic if they were developed better. Sure, Mogwai and other post rock bands have recorded short songs, but many times, those songs flow into each other, where on this album, every song is it's own entity and none of them seem to have anything to do with each other, just like pop songs on a popular album. Post rock doesn't have to be all lengthy songs, they just have to have more depth to them.

The rhythms on each song pretty much hold a constant beat on each individual song, This is also to help the music be more pop- like. Doing this would make you think that each track must have it's own personality, but they really don't. What you end up getting here are some songs that might be mildly interesting, but they also tend to not have anything memorable about them. The titles don't seem to support anything in the individual tracks. For example, "Suicide By Star" could just have easily been called "Climbing a Broken Ladder and Jumping Into a Small Metal Bucket" and still wouldn't have been any different. It's like they recorded the music and decided to label it something that sounded like it might be post rock-ish.

So, it is pleasant in it's own way, but it really isn't anything that would get you interested in investigating their other albums. I think the best way to describe this is Post Rock Lite. It just seems to lack emotion and depth to me and it devoid of much feeling. It doesn't take a lot of brain cells to listen to it, but it doesn't seem to generate a lot of interest for me either. I will give it a low 3 star rating because the production is good, and listening to one track now and then is okay, but I can't seem to garner much interest in it all together as a package, it just gets dull too fast.

I completely and utterly understand why the entire world of post-rock hates God is an Astronaut. Even more than Explosions in the Sky, who simply packaged down Godspeed You! Black Emperor into predictable burst of constant crescendo, God is an Astronaut dare to take post- rock, and instrumental rock in general, to riskily accessible levels. I can see purists getting mad whenever some uneducated music fan says 'I normally don't like music without words, but I really like God is an Astronaut', because their music is so safe, and trying so hard to be as accessible as instrumental music can physically be, as if they're trying to push post-rock into the radio market. But above all of my intellectual knowledge that these guys are watering down a genre known to be epic, inaccessible and pretentiously grandiose into bite-size segments for the mass market, I still actually enjoy them, even if only a little bit.

Although they would shift their sound a bit in the future, in both good ways and bad, towards ambient, electronic, and shoegaze sounds, All Is Violent, All Is Bright remains the definitive God is an Astronaut album, in terms of their skills at condensing post-rock into memorable, tight, and melodically dressed four-to-six minute jams. The ambient and the electronic parts are here (not really any shoegaze until later), but they take a back seat to the sounds of streamlined, ultra- melodic third wave post-rock. And even then, I regularly feel the ambience and electronics are some of the weaker elements here, 'Forever Lost', despite its wonderfully uplifting melody line, utilises way too many casio synthesisers to make its ambience, sounding straight out of a 14- year-old's 'ambient' bedroom project. Later on in their career, the electronic elements would become a positive side to their music, but on this album, let's just say they're pretty poor. I'm particularly not a fan of when the drums come in and completely ruin the mood of 'When Everything Dies'

But basically, when you throw out the fact that this has none of the raw emotion of Godspeed or the innovative sounds of early post-rock, you can really start to appreciate it as one of the most memorable and accessible takes on instrumental rock music to date, without relying heavily on intense crescendos. Similar to many pop artists, these songs are short, have distinct repetitions, and focus heavily on memorable melodies, usually played on guitar, although piano features regularly, and the opening track even has some Sigur R's-esque distant vocals carrying its lead hook.

And then there are the crescendocore tracks. If you can give points to God is an Astronaut for anything else on this record, it's that they didn't go full-on explosion in every single track, like some of their imitators do. 'Suicide by Star' has an absolutely gripping piece of explosion-core, bringing in the tremolo guitars in mounds and ramping up the intensity to true post-rock levels, although its brief length does make it a bit of an anti-climax.

But what this album, and this band in general, is missing from its formula is the vastness of post- rock. Without huge tracks and monolithic soundscapes, these guys sound a bit too weak underneath their cousins, because even though they interject ambient passages into the structures, and many of the songs have a slower and more laid-back mood, with their formula of short and cheery, God is an Astronaut miss out on so much depth in songwriting. It's not as if they need 20-minute tracks to be good, but oftentimes this album feels like a stack of songs, one after another, that are just the same thing played in a different key with varying degrees of loudness. I wouldn't go as far to call it derivative - these guys certainly have their own sound, it's just that it's not a sound that lasts all too long, even within an album. This could have been cut to a 5-song EP (doesn't matter which ones, just pick a few) and it would have the same effect.

Repeat listens don't do this good either, I'm afraid. I liked every song on this when i first heard it, and now several absolutely drive me up the wall, mostly because of how simple the melodies are, again in a similar way to vapid pop music. The melody in 'Fire Flies and Empty Skies', it just feels so lazy and basic, and obviously without the crescendocore of Explosions in the Sky, they haven't even got the 'emotion' to back it up. And in its follow-up, 'A Deafening Distance", we get one melody repeating ad nauseam, with an equally dull drum beat underneath, but that song fortunately saves itself by giving it a bit of punch with the final few rounds. Many of these songs feel so incredibly underdeveloped, and I don't mean that they are too short, I mean that some songs are entirely based around a very simple idea, and four minutes of one melody does wear thin after a few listens.

This is a good album. It's good background music, I feel - not emotional enough to be distracting, but captivating enough to not feel bored. They certainly have a knack for memorable melodies without the need of a vocalist, which is something that is vital in an instrumental band, but without the enormity and emotional power that a band like Godspeed has, the music becomes a bit nondescript, a bit pedestrian. And in combination with many of the songs being a bit lazily written An enjoyable record, I feel. Certainly far from a classic, and it certainly deserves a lot of the flack it takes for being a bit dull and song-centric, but I do enjoy it a little bit. Just don't play it more than a couple of times, or it will start to dig into you.

6.4

Originally written for my Facebook page/blog: www.facebook.com/neoprogisbestprog