The Beta Band were one of the most acclaimed Scottish bands of the late 1990s, bringing the bucolic to the iMac age. While their genre-agnostic indie-with-beats blew the minds of critics suffering from Oasis fatigue, it never quite caught on with the broader public, and by 2005 the group were no more. On Astronomy for Dogs, the Beta Band co-founder Gordon Anderson and former members Robin Jones and John Maclean revisit familiar psychedelic experiments, displaying impressive knowledge of pop's history but adding little to it themselves.
Good as it is to have these dudes back, their reunion sounds disappointingly anticlimactic. The piano-splashed rock 'n' roll of upbeat first single "The Happy Song" indicates the guys are "happy happy happy," but for an unapologetically stupid pop song it's damningly devoid of a decent hook-- let alone the stark beauty of the Kinks' "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy". Astronomy for Dogs opens with solo-spattered second single "Setting Sun", something like "All Along the Watchtower" with lyrics befitting the Chemical Brothers' homonymous 1996 single. What, too proud to call it a cover?
The album is full of such moments where sonic reference trumps songwriting, a problem that also sometimes befalls other recent purveyors of record-collector rock like Band of Bees and the Earlies (if I mention Girl Talk I might get fired). The Aliens skip from the close Cyrkle harmonies and Del Shannon guitar arpeggios of plaintive kiss-off "Tomorrow" to join Midlake's 70s soft-rock revival on long-haired piano whimper "Honest Again". Token krautrock droner "Only Waiting" exhales India-scented melodies until tripping into a hyperactive "I Am the Walrus"-meets-Psycho orchestral psyche-out. And so on.
It's not that the Aliens are incapable of the pop fireworks that made the Beta Band a name classmates used to ask me about on their way back from High Fidelity. "She Don't Love Me No More" is a mild, string-enhanced take on towering Southern rock balladry, synth-laden "Rox" touches down for sidewalk-strutting funk, and kazoo-toting Merseybeat bouncer "Glover" intermittently morphs into a mean game of outer-space pinball. Still, even these songs sound more like imitations of past glory than new incarnations of the same pioneering spirit.
The most "Dry the Rain"-like track here, swooning anthem "I Am the Unknown", is perhaps illustrative of the Aliens' shortcomings. Picking up the weirdness of Anderson solo project Lone Pigeon, it's one of two songs on this album that end with the chanted reminder, "We are the Aliens". Two other songs shoot back, "I am the Robot Man"-- and only one is future-funk breakdown "Robot Man". Whoever recorded Astronomy for Dogs, they're not the Beta Band anymore.
