Ive been a little burnt out of late. The "real" world has me running in circles, writing relentlessly on pieces of paper, ticking generic statements in countless matrices, listening to ill-founded diatribes on Australian identity, preparing self-serving diatribes of my own, rinse and repeat. Staring down the barrel of potential unemployment from atop a veritable mountain of looming debt, manuscripts and report cards. Job hunting amongst the heaving masses of the have-nots, trying to prove my worth as being more worthy than you.
Dunedin duo Astro Children's Proteus is the kind of melodic yet atonal, young-kids-screaming, everything's-all-right-when-the-music-is-all-wrong album that I intravenously syphon into my inner core, knowing that happiness can come from the simplest things. There is a schoolyard petulance to these new tracks that not only eschews the band's previous sugar-twee stance on noisy guitar pop, but belies that there are positives to the world being a little hostile. Millie Lovelock's vocals sway from schoolgirl screeching ('Shoe') to floating babble a la Raincoats ('Gaze'), showing the duo's newly formed dexterity, but it's the mid level groovers like 'Jamie Knows' or 'Big Muff (Strikes Again)' that Astro Children beeline to the core of what is enjoyable about deliberately off-kilter, slightly lo-fi, muted, horizontal-slacker pop. I thought I was going to drown today, but Proteus proves that sometimes to get to the end, you need to start at the beginning. Nice work, kids.
You can buy Proteus through Muzai Records now - pick it up here.
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