After two EPs titled ‘Revolutions’ and ‘In Orbit – Volume 1’, The Great Mistake has released their debut album ‘Wave To The Astronaut’, which was two years in the making since its production was interrupted when the band’s drummer left.
When you know nothing about a band, and listen for the first time to the music, you desperately look for notes and riffs that seem familiar, search for something that you could recognize and could give you some indication where you are, in which territory you have landed. And there are many of these indications when you listen to this album.
At times it could be a little bit like a meeting between Ben Folds Five’s keyboard and The Mars Volta or The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ guitars, some of the songs being keyboard driven, other dominated by raging and chaotic guitars and droning bass, whereas the vocals can go from murmur and faded echoes to full blasting screams.
‘Haphazard’, the opening track, puts you right away in the mood, with some of these explosive guitar outbursts battling with infuriated keyboards, whereas the climate of the next song ‘Flashbulb Memory’ culminates in outrage with its angry spoken vocals and the alarmed guitar backed up by the menacing bass line, which could even remind some of the riffs of Rage Against the Machine. But I would not like to give a false impression, the album is not always angry and noisy, it is just very moody going from a tempest to some more gentle weather like ‘Escape Velocity’, although the same song can be itself a very changing and unstable weather, never setting down for a specific mood.
The lyrics also translate this instability, and after so much noisy fury, the frustration dissolves into a mere hesitation ‘Well I’m not so sure that I want to go on/But I’ve already come this far/So I can’t turn back now/Well I’m not so sure that I want to go on’
There is sometimes some of this atmospheric and adventurous pop The Super Furry Animals are good at, in particular in a song like ‘Adrift’ with the eerie vocals, the background noises mixed with confused spoken and electronic clamors, which could make you imagine an astronaut’s walk on the moon.
The anger returns with ‘Demons’ which is described in the press release of the album to be ‘about Pat Robertson, Scientologists, Army recruiters, Kirby vacuum salesmen and Girl Scouts… ‘ a full exasperation directed against people and organizations taking advantage of other’s hesitation and frustration, with a line that contains two words which now belong to a famous band: ‘Your pamphlets tell me what am I doing wrong/You quote your words from your neon bible’
The rage partly calms down during the second part of the album which brings more hope with lines like ‘Is it about time/I got out of bed?’ in ‘Paper Moon’, as the astronaut may have reached the moon at last, not without getting rid of some extra load with ‘Jettison’ whose ascending melody culminates in a chaotic and distorted sound.
With poppy sounds, ‘Midnight in Dublin’ triggers emotions and tries to be more than just a pop song with its multi-layered and adventurous harmonies and its somewhat nostalgic and uplifting high-pitched guitar line, shifting direction many times to restore hope and confidence.
Some of the songs will undoubtedly evoke Radiohead’s desolation, like the buzzing ‘This Time’s Awake’ and ‘In Reverse’, although this later one does not stay in this territory very long (and that’s why these guys are really hard to pigeonhole), as it becomes something else with blasting vocals over a mad keyboard screaming a new belief in the present. ‘Don’t spend your life/Handing to the past’.
ith its wobbly synthesizer, and stumping keyboard, ‘Virgo’ may be the only jokingly executed song about the fact that astrology is precisely a joke: ‘And you and I we can laugh at the stars/Cause I don’t get/All that bullshit/that they feed’
And this woozy synthesizer, as well as the slow keyboard of ‘Arbour Lane’ could be something like a cross between Bowie’s favorite, Grandaddy (although nothing is ever as spacey as the ‘The Sophtware Slump’) and an exhilarating Elton Johm-que surge on keyboard.
The four-piece band (Steve Abramowski on drums and percussion, Chris Buczkowski on guitar and synth, Joe Castanza on keyboards, guitar, and lead vocals, and Will Webb on bass and backing vocal) knows how to create drama and passion with complex songs which bring you on a epic and chaotic trip to the moon and back, just to make you more aware that the present is all we have.