Man Or Astro-Man?: EEVIAC: Operational Index And Reference Guide, Including Other Modern Computational Devices

Though they're not as trendy as they were at the height of Dick Dale's Pulp Fiction-fueled mid-'90s comeback, surf-rock bands are everywhere, peddling mostly instrumental, reverb-intensive, occasionally kitsch-minded rock without a ton of variety. But over the course of the last seven years, the prolific, Alabama-based Man Or Astro-Man? (which purports to be from the outer-space outpost of Grid Sector 23&shyp;B61) has consistently and refreshingly tweaked that formula, adding desperately needed quirks to what might have been a mere rehash of old ideas. "Interstellar Hardrive," which opens the wonderfully and cumbersomely titled EEVIAC: Operational Index And Reference Guide, Including Other Modern Computational Devices, may be a fairly prototypical trash-rock surf rave-up—bookended, of course, by samples from science-fiction B-movies—but the album quickly deviates from that formula. The jaunty "D:contamination" sounds like it's from space; "Domain Of The Human Race" is an accessible, if clearly Devo-inspired, 93-second pop-rock song; "Fractionalized Reception Of A Scrambled Transmission" features the ominous vocal of a guest computer; and the album's second half mixes in numerous brief song fragments and interludes. The left-field touches—from the short, murky, low-fidelity rock song "Psychology Of A.I. (Numbers Follow Answers)" to an album-closing "automated liner-notes sequence" performed by the EEVIAC mainframe computer—keep the record fresh and fun, but there are still some great, fully fleshed-out songs. The best, "A Reversal Of Polarity," soars on epic guitar lines, computerized keyboard burps, a colossal hook, and the ominous opening sample, "…a situation where every single atom, every molecule here, is duplicated here—except that it's in reverse!" Awesome!