Astro-Lloyd - Let's Get Weird (Astro-Lloyd Music)

Punk rock might be a bit too brash and abrasive for many. Stoner rock often can only be appreciated fully if you are in “the zone,” if you know what I mean. Prog rock is a bit too ornate for some and anything tagged as being experimental music can get, well, a bit too odd, quite frankly. But if a band could just take the best aspects of all those genres, lose the baggage, and swerve the cliche, then I’m sure they would be able to come up with something exciting, not to mention genuinely unique.

Well, enough of the speculation, as the fabulously named Let’s Get Weird, the new EP from Astro-Lloyd, does just that. This EP is forged at a very precise and almost impossible-to-find point of the musical Venn Diagram, a place where all of those genres briefly intersect. It is the music of the liminal spaces, music of the margins, music of the sonic edgelands.

But despite the seemingly opposite nature of the genres I have listed above, Astro-Lloyd makes them work—and work brilliantly, finding the sympathy of sounds required to blur the lines and blend things together into a seamless symphony.

“Cowboy” is an alt-rocker pushing into grunge-infused sonics, but with enough punk energy to keep things moving along perfectly, “Dolph” is the sound of pop-punk being warped into grungey-stoner anthemics and “23.19” is a strange skittering rock music that is so deft and changeable that it shimmers with proggy creativity. (And no one is dressed as a wizard, and there is no 19-minute bass solo, so that’s good.) Things wrap up with “Speedracer,” which has been retooled as an 80s alt-pop-soft-rock ballad. It is odd, unexpected, and quite brilliant.

Music is at its best when you can’t quite pigeonhole it. Astro-Lloyd makes just such music—but it is music that doesn’t think out of the box. It would do, but it can’t even see the box from the place that it calls home.

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