ALL IS VIOLENT, ALL IS BRIGHT

After listening to this album several times, my impression of God is an Astronaut is a lite Post Rock band. Their brand of post rock is to try to make it easy for people to listen to. Personally, I don't think post rock was meant to be accessible, yet they try their hardest to make it so. Except for some wordless vocals in "Fragile", all of the songs on this album are instrumentals, so they check the first box on their post rock formula. Songs are based on the usual post rock formula, that of crescendos built off of a basic melody line.

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.