Audio By Carbonatix
Ever since last year’s macrocomputer concept album EEVIAC, Man or Astro-Man? has been working off no known template. That is, if all you know about MOAM? is the surf revival stuff from its first albums on Estrus, you’ve missed out on some pretty important shifts in attitude. A Spectrum of Infinite Scale offers the perfect opportunity to play catch up.
Like EEVIAC before it, Spectrum is a total-package offering. The artwork, the CD slipcase (or double 10-inch vinyl), the type fonts and graphic layout are all designed as part of MOAM?’s guerilla art project, which posits that the band crash-landed on earth sometime around 1993, taking the form of indie rockers in order to conceal their plan for world domination. Line upon line of dot-matrix print reveals the song titles, which skirt the boundary between unintelligible and hilarious, e.g. “Curious Constructs of Stem-like Devices Which Now Prepare Themselves to Be Thought of As Fingers,” and “Many Pieces of Large Fuzzy Mammals Gathered Together at a Rave and Schmoozing With a Brick” (not the first time MOAM? has riffed on Pink Floyd’s spacier titles; compare “Interstellar Hard Drive” on its previous album). One title is 23 words long. One title is nothing but a trapezoid, an actual trapezoid. Liner notes are written in Greek, Russian and Hebrew — dot matrix-printed Hebrew — in addition to English. The cover is a direct lift from the opening of the “Through the Star Gate” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Science fiction, not surf, was always MOAM?’s dominant musical metaphor, and Spectrum is no exception. Heavier on rhythm samples and programmed sounds (also theremin and lap steel) than previous albums, Spectrum might be the sound of the band lifting back into space, transmitting from a safer distance. Because for all their (understandable) reluctance to get labeled “space rockers” now that “surf rockers” doesn’t even superficially fit, this album’s overall sound is that of intercepted noise behind the music. Ghostly rumbles, spiraling ray-gun sounds and mysterious beeps and boops run beneath the instrumentals on Spectrum, so that listening to it is like jamming the TV station between channels and watching shadowy forms emerge through the static.
Not that the album itself is disorganized, mind you. MOAM? is talented enough that even the most chaotic moments on Spectrum are carefully engineered; you get the feeling that you’re hearing exactly what fuzziness the band wanted you to hear, and no more. For those who have yet to experience the cuckoo wonder of MOAM?, this is probably not the album to begin with (go back to the classic first album Is It . . . or Destroy All Astromen!! for starters); but for anyone who’s familiar with what came before, Spectrum is a rewarding evolution.
