Four years in the making, the release of Calling All Astronauts’ latest album, “Noise Against Tyranny” comes with its fair share of internal pressure. Not least because of the success of their preceding album “#Resist” and the highly successful 10 singles worked on in collaboration with double Grammy winner Alan Branch released in between the albums. Formed in 2011 in London, Calling All Astronauts is a band made up of the duo Vocalist programmer David B and multi-instrumentalist Paul McCrudden. Influences such as Ministry, Sisters of Mercy, Nine Inch Nails, and Pendulum inform their blend of Electro, Goth, Post-Punk, Industrial Metal and EDM, which has allowed them a unique place in the alternative rock scene.
Much like their previous three albums, Post Modern Conspiracy (2013), Anti-Social Network (2016), and #Resist (2020), their fourth album, “Noise Against Tyranny”, released last July, is entirely political in nature. The key track, “Pray for Your Soul” is a catchy anthem that comes with an interesting music video.
David B’s gothic vocals indulge its satanic aspects more than usual, fittingly to a backdrop of provocative imagery, including a neon-glowing cross and Christian mass; darker visuals like screaming faces that are reminiscent of “The Grudge” and burnings at the stake; all intersected with indulgent, nearly satirical video game-like rotating skulls in the void.
Neither the song nor the video are shy in their critique of Conservative Christianity, its ties to fascism, and the black world it has created, simultaneously inviting everyone to live in it, marketing it as a utopia with no suffering and no pain, while still demanding we all pray in fear for our souls, but the song offers us its own version of this “black world”, a world where everyone is equal. As the key track, it takes centre stage with a consistent beat and coherent composition. However, with all the other complexities involved, it sonically remains rather simple, demanding little attention to the instruments and the music. At least as far as it can be compared to the following track “Will Somebody Help Me?”
The gothic, industrial vocals remain while allowing a more complex composition and layering between different instruments to come in. Multiple guitar solos, gritty synths, with a heavy focus on electronics in general, creating a more texturally-interesting background to a disparate cry for help. An equally important subject-matter, mental health struggles, mixed with the solitude of our modern world, take centre stage. Grittier, faster, and more urgent, “War on Truth” adds another timely subject matter to the list included in the album: propaganda and disinformation. With no veil of subtlety, this track is clear, angry, and fast. Fittingly in contrast with the side at the other end of the assault.
Tracks like “More than You Need” and “Time to Party” add a much appreciated variety, with more focus on bass and drums, with the latter taking its focus off politics for moment to instead linger on the question of genre and its imaginary boundaries, while tracks like “I Can’t Breathe” and “Take me to Hell” are dedicated to other societal problems like domestic abuse and climate change. The majority of the album, however, is focused on the new forms of fascism and their ties to the older form, the hellish cycle we’re in, and the endlessly tiresome rhetoric associated with it.
With fascism on the rise nearly everywhere in the West once again, the album, worked on during the Global Pandemic, is both timely and angry. It is a testament to what the underground industrial scene has to offer, both musically, and largely as a conscious art-form that invites us to think alongside it.
