ARTIST: Ad Astra Per Aspera
TITLE: Catapult Calypso
LABEL: Sonic Unyon
GENRE: Indie
BITRATE: 217kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 40m total
RELEASE DATE: 2006-10-03
RIP DATE: 2006-08-01
Track List
----------
A1. Voodoo Economics 3:44
A2. Post-Scarcity Sing-a-Long 2:35
A3. Scatter Baby Spiders! 4:02
A4. Nothing Else is the Real Thing 5:23
A5. Unnamed Acoustic Songs 2:30
A6. Glosbos Illuminados 5:42
A7. A Fish Would Much Rather Swim 4:15
A8. Everybody Lets Me Down 2:53
A9. The Romantic One 4:46
A10.Flannery's Coming Home 4:53
Release Notes:
Ad Astra Per Aspera is a band of our generation, sounding out 2006 with their
long-awaited full-length Catapult Calypso. After college degrees, jobs, marriage
and a diaspora of their cohort, these twenty-somethings find themselves still
housed in their homegrown Midwest scene, poised for an ever greater realization
of their music and potential.
Formed in 2002, the Lawrence, Kansas five-piece has endured much in endeavoring
to be a band ù a distinct, resonant and exciting project as their two EPs
(2003Æs An Introduction To and 2004Æs Cubic Zirconia) and hundreds of
performances would argue ù over the past four years. Primarily, however, Ad
Astra Per Aspera has taken the care and time of experience to grow into their
new record, with Calypso as inspirational evidence that their creative resources
have not been sapped, nor their candid musical adventurism disenchanted in the
process. Instead, AAPA asserts with Calypso that this is how it feels to be
animated by noise, rhythm, melody and lyrical impressions. The evolving band
stands with conviction as they present to the world of tours, contracts and
"making it big". A record of the journey, Calypso is a sprawling, earnest
testament to where they are actively going.
For better or for worse, Ad Astra Per Aspera is not afraid of their own sound.
They are not afraid of the groove, to sound alternately mature and thoughtful,
uncertain, or galvanized by angst. And Calypso reminds me of what making music
should be like: engaging and intriguing from the outset, with successfully
ambitious song structures that feel like new experience, yet melodic enough to
linger once the amps and stereos have been turned off. The albumÆs epic closer,
"FlanneryÆs Coming Home," asks, "Ok? Ok! We improvise or we replicate" and the
artistic dilemma infuses the ten songs on Calypso with a palpable urgency;
electric and pulsating, there is an immediate energy and necessary authenticity
in each song that will seize your sympathies, positing that there is no better
way to answer that question than to rock it.
The AAPA sound likewise demands respect, both for its incestuous genre hopping
and assimilation of any influence that feels right for a given song. It is a
sound where each song has at once an aural reckoning and its own organic feel:
moody hip-hop loops end up as hooks for a spy filmÆs chase scene in "The
Romantic One"; atonal guitar riffing crescendos in a profoundly simple piano
scale by the resolution of "Scatter Baby Spiders"; and powerful nuance prevails
as the undercurrent for Calypso, with claps, chants, treble-filled feedback,
directing percussion, and vocal bursts or hushes stepping into the foreground as
the music directs. These songs are combustible: their pleasure is in the tension
of restraint and release and Calypso is a volatile offering of intensity-riddled
and revelatory jams masquerading as experimental rock songs.
Catapult Calypso is the natural outgrowth of Ad Astra Per AsperaÆs bountiful
store of impressions from the last four yearsÆ discoveries. Here audacity and
response form the discourse for a kind of sonic storytelling, the band
approximating a working understanding of just what world it is that they are
inheriting through song and expression. Their ambition is not to proselytize a
potential audience: just see them live to hear their faith in what 2006 sounds
like to them. Any group founded out of DIY sensibilities like Ad Astra Per
Aspera would be too pragmatic to expect rapture in response, but what else would
realizing the sound of reaching the stars through difficulty be like? They have
put the effort into taking something familiar further, and Calypso only makes me
want to grow up with the band again and again.