Album Review: Astrobrite - Deluxer

There are a number of good things about Deluxer, the recently released new effort from one-man shoegaze outfit Astrobrite.

The first is just a reminder of how fun home recording and self-releasing via Bandcamp can be. Dubbed the “Ronin mix” of the album, Mr. Astrobrite himself, Scott Cortez, dropped Deluxer around a month ago as a digital download only—the album is currently being mastered properly for a physical release to accompany his tour of Japan. Cortez said that the mixes found in the download are straight out of his laptop—and you can tell. It’s incredibly raw, which only adds to the charm.

The second, and more important thing about Deluxer is that it, to an extent, restores my faith in “shoegaze” as a genre; because it’s been a genre that’s really lacking anything interesting as of late. Last year saw releases from bands like Crisis Arm, Whirr, and Nothing. And those were all well and good—specifically that Crisis Arm joint.

But in 2015, there has been little to give any fucks at all about.

Many 90s ‘gaze outfits have reunited, and are taking to the festival circuit and national tours—like Ride or Slowdive. And then there’s a band like Swervedriver, also originating from the 90s, who recently put out a rather tepid, festering turd of a record, and that had me worried that my real interest in the genre and all of its theoretical subgenres had passed.

But man, within the first track on Deluxer, it all came rushing back.

On the album, Cortez has created a cacophonic, ramshackle, noisy affair. It’s confusing, beautiful, dissonant, and visceral. There are moments when I wasn’t even sure what was happening in the song because there was just so much happening, it all gets shuffled into one gorgeous and abrasive wall of sound—but again, this is why Deluxer is a reminder of what shoegaze can be. It doesn’t have to be sterile and just guitars with slight delay and reverb; it can be, and maybe needs to be, noisy and loud as fuck.

Cortez splits his time between Astrobrite, and the ambient/shoegaze ethereal stylings of a do named loveliescrushing (stylized that way.) Neither are very prolific, often taking years between releases. But it seems like Cortez is always working on music designated for one or the other—Astrobrite’s earliest material was recorded in the 90s but not released until 2001 in the form or Crush, which was later reissued in 2011 on vinyl via Chicago’s BLVD Records. I think it was through dinking around on Bandcamp, searching “shoegaze” that I initially encountered both projects, back when I had an office job with more downtime between work, and a firewall that wasn’t preventing streaming music from the internet.

Deluxer has been long gestating—Cortez had been posting updates on the Astrobrite Facebook page for a while now, talking about the various mixing techniques he was using to achieve the dissonance and total disregard for human eardrums.

But part of the charm, aside from just how unpolished and abrasive it all is, is that buried under all of that are pop hooks within Cortez’s “songwriting.” They are subtle, but oh, how they are there—specifically in the gigantic, sheer triumph of the title track, the huge “Wild Dogs Roam The Gleaming,” and the fuzzed out bliss of “Twins.”

As I mentioned earlier, it’s a beautiful, dissonant, and confusing listen. It’s a lot like life, in that sense, I guess. It can be cold and somber, self indulgent, and there can be glimmers of hope. Scott Cortez has somehow managed to pack all of that into less than an hour.

Deluxer is out now as a digital download.