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By: Bogar Alonso
Chicago, IL, USA
Ancient Astronauts - We Are To Answer
Kabanjak and Dogu of the intergalactic duo, Ancient Astronauts, have descended (at least according to their publicist) from a celestial voyage to bring us their debut album We Are To Answer. In their journey they have fine-tuned their musical prowess (cause that’s what you do in space—just ask Armstrong) to the point where they have fused our earthly musical genres into an opium of revelation.
On first listen, I feared that the album was just a blanket of mediocrity layered around the heavenly “Risin’ High.” Claiming to be other-worldly and actually embodying it are two different things. But riches are rarely attained with minimal effort; I spun the CD a good three more times to realize that it is “steady on [the] brain like a low cut afro.” Translation: it’s pretty great stuff. Take for instance the 9th track “Everybody.” As a microcosm of the album, “Everybody” takes some time to reach its pinnacle. It’s bouncy enough in the first two minutes but reaches that throve their publicist speaks of once the female vocals chime in. This track should be dominating the dance floors of a galaxy far, far away—or at least the land down under, as it evokes that great Aussie electronic group, The Avalanches.
Great electronic tunes such as “Everybody” aren’t the only thing on display in We AreTo Answer. The album is home to at least three definitive hip hop songs. And time will tell, as suggested by one of the candidates, the self-proclaiming “Classic,” if they have the chops to achieve classic status.
Having said all that, the debut suffers from staleness. The staleness is not the product of lack of ingenuity but rather an excessiveness of it. To arrive at the great “Classic,” for example, we first need to listen to over five minutes of instrumentation, in the guise of “From The Sky” and “I Came Running.” They are solid efforts but sound almost identical; one would have sufficed. This symptom runs prevalent across the album, making appreciating what’s good here that much harder. The effect is akin to jet lag, where a listen of the entire musical voyage exhausts.
In totality We Are To Answer is like the very space it venerates: there is much vacuity but enough stars shine through to captivate. This is not revolutionary stuff, but it could be. It might be to the Ancient Astronauts’ benefit to hit a minor lag on first time through for, according to the cryptic “Oblivion,” “a soldier with no enemy/ Never knows his own strength.” Their enemy is having aimed for the stars and losing themselves to space.
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All opinions expressed by Bogar Alonso are solely his own and do not reflect the opinions of Stay Thirsty Media, Inc.
