The Mighty Ocean and Nine Dark Theaters

Astronautalis debut album You and Yer Good Ideas did indeed shake a few good ideas out, but most were stuck under the album's lo-fi production, which left behind little more than the impression of a pair of Southern stoners messing around with bedroom tapes. Mighty Ocean and Nine Dark Theaters presents a far different aural vista, and thus this CD couldn't be further removed its predecessor. It doesn't, however, make categorizing Astronautalis any easier. Rap poet? Slacker soliloquist? C&W story spinner? Indie singer/songwriter? At some point or other, the artist falls into all these categories, sometimes simultaneously. The music further blurs the edges — hip-hop rhythms; ambient, synthesized soundscapes; gorgeous picked guitar that shift from iridescent indie to twangy country and on to shimmering pop. Most, but not all, of the pieces billow dreamily away, giving the album a diffuse, otherworldly feel where time slows or stops entirely. That atmosphere perfectly dovetails with Astronautalis lyrics/poems/raps, in which nothing much happens, no conclusions are really reached, and life, such as it is, seems utterly disconnected from the outside world. This isn't so much a slacker's paradise as a limbo-land, where the living ain't so easy, but whose sharp edges are smoothed over by alcohol, sex (often passing for love), and drugs. The denizens within all seem to be standing still or moving only in meaningless circles, with inconsequential events and emotions taking on oversized proportions, the past as unhappily recalled as the present, with few thoughts of the future, for tomorrow offers nothing more than today.

Unlike John Cougar Mellancamp and Bruce Springsteen's idyllic memories of small-town life, Astronautalis vividly etches its unseemly underbelly. With inescapable dead-ends and incredible insularity, this is a universe filled with unmoored lives oblivious to the world outside their own uncomfortable surroundings, and where even the flashes of teenaged exuberance are soon spent, as life floats on and on towards eternal nothingness. Small town, small lives, all played languorously out on a small stage will seem hauntingly familiar for some, horrifying for others, but in either case, it's a muted dystopia that won't soon be forgotten.