God Is An Astronaut - finally a less worshiping review.

What I'm gonna say here is probably gonna be the first and only unimpressed review of God Is An Astronaut on the internet ever. It's not gonna be a bad one, but be warned: my skin ain't pricklish.

So.

"Maaan, you have GOT to see GIAA live, they're aaawesome live!"

I have heard this statement more than once. So if I HAD to see them live, I went out and did it, cause that's how submissive I am. And yeah, they're a very good live band. But my hair simply refuzed to stand on end and I wondered why. Here's what I came up with.

1. They are an instrumental band. That's not exactly a stigma, but lack of lyrics means less connection with your audience. When you sing, you're talking to them, telling them a story. If you're just playing your instruments, the music may be great, but I'm having trouble understanding why you got pissed off and tortured your guitar for 5 minutes just there. Yeah, yeah, I know, I gotta go with it,  feel it. Yeah, well, sometimes you catch me angry or dreamy same time as you and we overlap and it's great. And sometimes you don't.

2. The music itself is good, but it's hardly brilliant or inventive. Some passages are plain boring beyond tears. Sometimes the guitars just get the fuck off the stage and go on a - say it with me - journey. Supposedly into outerspace, where it's cold and dark and I can't follow. Other bands go to space and it feels like you can follow, or it feels like a womb, or something. These guys just shoot out into epic space, everything's blazing and blowing and I'm just standing there wondering if I should let my hair grow again and impresonate Bon Jovi. Cause at least that would be funny.

Also. The compositions are simple. Easy. You can predict when they're gonna go unpredictable on you. As with Kwoon, you fucking know they're gonna suddenly burst into flames of noise and the crowd's gonna cheer and you're gonna feel great. It's in the manual. And that's why they're good live: you like that noise, don't you? It feels powerful, it feels strong, it feels mighty, right? You like that drum pounding in your chest, that's why you love live music, right? But guess what. The noise alone doesn't make a band great. You gotta have great music to back it up. And GIAA's songs are 80% boring and predictable. They are cool. They are today's music. And that's not always a good thing. That's what the teens want and they give them buckets of it. And it feels fucking great, just pouring and pouring and drenching you in sound and making your head spin. But if you actually listen to the music behind the noise, it's really not that impressive. It's like watching an waterfall for hours and hours. Beautiful image, but don't you get bored after, say, 20 minutes, really? Maybe less. You start finding patterns and it becomes the most predictable thing you've ever seen.

Oh, and the piano in one song (don't know the names of the songs) is actually the ending of NIN's "Perfect Drug" note by note. I won't hold it against them, it happens.

3. I'm too old to really FEEL songs with names such as "Suicide By Star", "Post Mortem", "Forever Lost", "Route 666", "Beyond The Dying Light" and so on. I can't take that shit seriously any more, it makes me laugh. You be young and dramatic, I have energy left only for mere quiet loneliness. I'm gonna say this: teenage suicide is plain hilarious. There.

But, to sum it all up, it wasn't a bad live experience. I've seen worse and I've seen better. It's just that I kinda felt like the music was beautiful and pointless at the same time. I'm getting the feeling that they're fishing praise in a barrel with that sound, it really taps into all this well of loneliness and melancholia and jadedness and emptiness that "young adults" are supposed to feel. All that beautiful sadness shit, all that martyrized nihilism. It's like a comic getting quick, cheap laughs with the word "fuck", it's too easy. The point is: if you find yourself thinking "boy, this venue sounds great", there might be something wrong with the band.

So yeah. We left before the encore, like two old farts and proud of it. You young kids go die a little meaningful death every time you listen to GIAA (or HIM, for that matter), I'm done with those theatrics.

So here's what boring sounds like:

God is an astronaut - Post Mortem