Album Review: Calling All Astronauts - "#Resist"

 

Well here's one we missed when it came out midway through last year. Hailing from London, Calling All Astronauts sound like some righteous cross between Ministry and Tones On Tail with the sledgehammer guitars and sinister electronica being pinned together with a vicious political invective to create something that's definitely intriguing.

Songs like Unholy Trinity, Divided States Of America and Give Them A Leader take a well-focused aim at the fucked up state of the world at the moment. There's a definite hint of the Sisters of Mercy circa Vision Thing here as well although CAA are much more overtly political than Eldritch and co ever were. And that's not a bad thing - it's quite a rare thing that you'll come across goth bands dipping their toes in these waters and it makes the likes of New World Disorder, Not In My Name and Post-Truth World feel just that bit more hard-hitting. Elsewhere, they train their lyrical guns on everything from vapid pop stars (Fifteen Minutes) to fascist scum (Welcome To The Black Bloc).

If there's a slight criticism of this album, it's that the production is a bit tinny in places but it's nothing that wouldn't be easy to fix on future efforts and the group have enough of a brutal kick to them to ensure that it's something that's fairly easy to overlook. Overall, this is a good album and one that's made me keen to check out some more of Calling All Astronauts' back catalogue (it's actually their third album which makes me wonder why it's taken so long to discover them!) Any road up, give this a listen, it's a much welcomed dose of political anger to shake up the goth/industrial scene.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nite Songs Top 50 Albums of 2023 - Part 5 (The Top 10)

Image
  And so the end is near...we present to you the ten best albums of the year just gone in our humble opinion... 10.     BEANS ON TOAST - "The Toothpaste And The Tube" Another regular presence in my end of year lists in recent years, The Toothpaste And The Tube  sees Jay McAllister aka Beans on Toast returning to the fray in fine form and taking on everything from the joys of life on tour ( Back Out On The Road , The Golden Lion ) through laments at the state of the country ( Hope & Glory , The Greenwash ) to enjoying the simpler things in life to get you through ( Swimming In The Sea , The Dragicorn ). McAllister is quite simply one of the best lyric writers in the country today and The Toothpaste And The Tube  is a fine place to start for those wanting to discover his work. *** 9.     CYANIDE PILLS - "Soundtrack To The New Cold War" Soundtrack To The New Cold War sees Leeds pop-punks the Cyanide Pills well and truly coming of age. The group have long been mast
Read more

Sounds From The Junkshop Special - The Wildhearts Part 2: The Split Years

Image
  "If hate is black and love is white then doubt's a shade of grey..."  - Silver Ginger 5 - Church Of The Broken Hearted I'll be honest, I've been wanting to do the second part of my Wildhearts story for a while now but given the amount of stuff I've had to sort out in the meantime for SFTJ I wanted the time to be right rather than just jumping ahead of the timeline. Well, we're now up to 1998 and I think it's safe to pick up the story again so let's do this. As I mentioned way back in part one of the Wildhearts story , 1997 saw the band splitting up amid a flurry of drug demons, record deals gone wrong and a chronically unstable line-up (in more ways than one). However, with so many ex-members now moving on to new musical projects, it did mean that there were suddenly a lot  of new bands on the horizon featuring one or more ex-members of the group and it's fair to say that I had quite a few stories based around the band from that split in the
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure,
Read more