Astronoid - Astronoid

Even though I had heard quite a bit of hype about this album’s soulful and ethereal sonic beauty, I had also heard a lot of tempering of that hype by critics hushing the murmur around the band’s eponymous sophomore LP by pointing out the lack of originality of what they saw as just an average piece of post-metal. And after listening to this album quite a few times (I think it’s been a dozen now), I can really see both sides of the coin of perspectives surrounding it. On one hand, my first few listens had me more in line with the less amused critics, hearing not really anything inhadnt heard before, and not really moved much by what the band was putting forth. But the more I listened, and found myself wanting to come back to it the more I began to find myself pulled in by the album’s beauty as it revealed its simple shine to me with each listen. Indeed, Astronoid is no groundbreaking album for post-metal, and it’s not trying to be something it isn’t. The album crafts its appeal through the balance and texture of its compositions and the vulnerable, heartfelt authenticity it’s able to convey through them. The album is slathered in these angelic clean vocals that just ever so slightly hearken to early 2000’s emo and post-punk (without sounding whiny), as well as bright, refreshing passages of both slightly distorted melodic guitar leads and reverb-ified guitar echoes, and it’s nothing new on paper, but it is the kind of album that proves to be more than just the sum of its parts. The album is never coasting too long on post-rock ambiance or post-metal clichés either; the band is always incorporating some tasty double-bass groove, shoegazy tremolo picking, or even a cool riff that you wouldn’t expect from an album like this one. The song “Water” in particular kicks off with an especially full and enthralling riff that feels like the greatest triumph over an old self’s hindrances, and the songs “Lost” and “Ideal World” are rife with particularly slick examples of the double-bass rhythms that keep the energy of the album up and from slipping into spacy mindlessness. While songs like “Fault” and “I Wish I Was There While the Sun Set” kind of find the album settling into its own effervescent momentum through restrained uses of many of the same modalities of the more bombastic songs surrounding them, they do so without dropping the energy of the album too low or droning on through an obvious lack of imagination. I will say, the heavenly, ambient, uplifting appeal of this album is kind of one-dimensional, but what the band set out to do, they do comprehensively and with evident capability to maintain its viability in a long-play format such as this. I can see how critics tired of it after soon finding out what it had to offer from a stylistic standpoint; it does really expend what little novelty it has rather quickly, but I think it’s an album that does its style justice and proves itself to be more than just what it is on paper. I enjoyed it the more I listened to it, and the closer I got to it, the more its best moments elevated my spirits the way they were clearly meant to.