Like a little blue pill the real Dr. Leo Spacemen would probably prescribe, Sydney music band Dr. Spaceman are a dopamine releasing four piece guitar band. Their three track EP It Depends put a smile on my dial, so much so that I decided to write a few nice words about it before I suffered from the inevitable serotonin depletion. Then I listened to it again. And again. Now it’s three weeks later and I’m only just getting around to writing all this down:
The opening track Little Requests is downright pleasant as fuck, a musically devious smile which hides the dark, anxious lyrics bubbling underneath – a little like Pavement’s Silence Kid. Without reading too much into it, I reckon the story takes some influence from AMC’s Breaking Bad, or was at least written while we were all in that Albuquerque methlab headspace – I know for a fact that a band that names itself after a 30 Rock character watches a lot more TV than is healthy. Track two switches up what we’ve come to expect, Out of Sight, Out of Mind showing off the band in their jam-mode. Subtly over driven guitars, drum rolls aplenty and beautifully mixed backing vocals leave this track sounding like a chilled out B-side from Humbug era Arctic Monkeys, it’s a high density track in terms of the number of chorus-verse-breakdown patterns it follows. It might not be as complicated as I think, but the way the track fades out to a pleasant nothing that leaves you wanting more at least gives the illusion that it’s a complex number.
Track three closes up shop, stepping up the overdrive and confronting that issue that we all sort of have to deal with. Alongside breakups and coming down from/acquiring drugs, growing up is the most talked about issue in music. It’s a product of the market (people purchasing music are concerned with growing up) as much as it is a product of the creative side (musos are often in the process of also growing up), which is why a pretentious New York layabout is the voice of our generation. My Attributes deals with parental expectations, the prospect of a depressingly long and uninteresting life and other cushy first world issues and successfully puts these themes into a listenable and damn near enjoyable piece of music. That cheesy synthy tone that bookends the track is what does it for me – no pretension there, just a fucking rad octaving bumblebee noise. Why not!
And Dr. Spaceman makes you think just that while you listen to it. Why the fuck not? Like the empathogenic effects of Dr. Leo Spaceman’s aforementioned prescriptions, Dr. Spaceman make music that simply doesn’t make you feel like a douche-bag. You may very well still be a douche-bag, but listening to Dr. Spaceman’s EP might just limit the symptoms. I’d prescribe that you take a moment in between listening to that tape-only Bushwalking single you picked up at Repressed Records and re-watching Six Feet Under to give it a listen.
They’ve just announced a show on March 8th at Dicey Riley’s down in the Gong alongside The Sidetracked Fiasco and tonnes of cool dudes – check out the details right here.
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