When you are meant to review an single by a band called SpaceManAntics, its hard to take their music seriously. Good thing that this small band out of Freo seem like they want you to do just that- enjoy their specific breed of psych-pop, their weird and oft-unintelligible lyrics and their lo-fi production, without having to think too hard.
The single’s A-side ‘Katzenjammer’ clearly takes influence from the trippy, psychedelic rock sounds of the 70s and early 80s. Each component of the track is dripping in synthesised, edited glory; a loose throwback to the hallucinogenic side of early 70s Krautrock (also indicated by the single’s vaguely Germanic title.) The group’s lead singer drones a ‘Slow down/Come down/It’s alright, don’t fight it’, guiding listeners through a whimsical descent from a LSD-induced musical trip of beeps and electronic noise- as if you’ve just run through a games arcade whilst higher than a kite.
B-side ‘Dont Be The Last’ takes a much heavier influence from Krautrock and the likes of Faust, with a slight tinge of Joy Division on the edges. Again, it’s a psychedelic sounding track- a much faster pace than ‘Katzenjammer’, and certainly more reminiscent of something Tame Impala might have tacked onto the end of Lonerism or Innerspeaker. For someone unfamiliar to the pop-psych/lo-fi genre, it would just sound like a mash of noise that’s kind of been awkwardly strung together, complete with nigh-indecipherable lyrics, and thrown through a multitude of synthesisers. But for the faithful, it’s a manic 2:25 minute dash that serves as balance to ‘Katzenjammer’- a clouded soberness to the A-side’s drug-induced psychedelic.
Review by Bridget Rumball