What I'm Listening To, 2025.06.02

"send it up and bring it down turn the echo on again"

It baffles me that Man or Astro-man? could have possibly released music in the 2010s. If pressed, I’d grudgingly accept that they might have released an album in 2000 or 2001, but they seem like a uniquely pre-9/11 phenomenon for me. I finally got around to listening to their 2013 release Defcon 5…4…3…2…1. (A brief look through their discography seems to confirm my prejudices. The entire rest of their catalog dates from 2001 or before.)

It’s a great record. It blends just enough of their earlier goofiness with the post-rock tinge that most rock bands developed through the early 2000s (and about which you’ll hear no complaints from me). Listening to the album walking around Beacon Hill I kept coming back to “Electric Arc”. It’s straight-forwardly catchy, with a good lyrical hook. The blooping, arpeggiated synth intro sets a Devo-esque mood that is immediately discarded for fun a fun sleeze-rock love song.

I also quite liked the instrumental tracks on the record, including the final track, “Defcon 1” (of course). The white noise fuzz and the slinky surf rock riffs make it seem a little too joyous to fit the name, but it’s got a good chaotic energy and just the right amount of goofy space noises to make it a fun.

One of the core tenets of this column is that we always give props to bands that take a big fucking swing. The Lambrini Girls appear to be incapable of taking small swings. Their ultra current brand of screaming punk is vibrant and shows that punk’s corpse still shambles on, picking up new affectations as it goes. With different lyrics, this still would have opened up a massive pit at any shows in the 80s.

It also shows the value of songs that are topical to the point of temporal isolation. Maybe it’s because I’m not the target audience (being twenty years too old and 100% too male), but I can’t imagine the lyrics resonating with people twenty years ago our twenty years from now, but for today, the rage is perfectly calibrated and expressed.

I recently listened to an interview with the inimitable Kim Kelly who, among other work, writes the fantastic metal newsletter Salvo. In the interview she mentioned Glacial Tomb, with whom I wasn’t familiar. I was delighted to find out that they sling chaotic, sludgy death metal. I was less delighted to find out that they were playing in Seattle on a day when I had pre-existing plans, so I couldn’t get my face melted off in person.

I’ve written here before about my challenges in finding work music, and Glacial Tomb fills the perfect niche of being energetic and driving while having lyrics that are completely inscrutable so that they don’t interfere with my language processing. (I am absolutely incapable of writing or coding while there are words in my ears.)

In fact, Glacial Tomb’s lyrics are so far on the growl/shout side of the metal vocalist topology that they function more like textural element than a narrative one. There’s a surprising amount of variation and emotion in Ben Hutcherson’s gutteral vocals, and it adds nicely to the dark, grinding chaos the trio puts out.