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Day 5: “This is Our Science” — Pulling it all together

One of the great fallacies of history education is that everything in history has led up to THIS point. It’s the narrative of “never-ending progress.” Once upon a time, the world was imperfect. We had slavery, women didn’t have the right to vote, we watched television shows with laugh tracks.

(Wait… Most people still do that?… Really? Big Bang Theory? Not Community? That’s what’s popular?… Huh… I need to get out of my bubble now and again.)

Anyway, this narrative is inherently problematic: human history is not a narrative of unending progress, and to assume that prevents us from critically analyzing our present conditions. Or from identifying what worked in the past and applying it to current problems. Yet it’s one that has innate appeal, and we as teachers and students of history fall back on it all the time. It also fits well with how we want to live our own lives. Everything that I was when were 6, 16, 26, whatever, has helped create the person that I am right now. And I have just been getting better and better as a person over that time… right? Maybe. Maybe not.

So take it with a grain of salt when I sayeverything Astronautalis has done has led to this point and this is his best album ever!

In all seriousness, though, this is the most consistently high quality album in Astronautalis’s catalogue and the most polished. It’s not, though, the lackadaisical walk through suburbia that was The Mighty Ocean. Or even the cool strut through history that was Pomegranate. Bothwell has taken the formula behind “The Trouble Hunters” and made a whole album around that arrangement. Loud guitars, pounding drums, the mob of voices screaming into the mic. Credit goes to Astronautalis’s numerous musical contributors, including producer John Gongleton, Radical Face, P.O.S , and most famously, Tegan Quinn. You also have to note the superstars of this album, drummer McKenzie Smith and pianist Chad Stockslager. They bring this album to dizzying heights over and over again. Picnic Tyme gives us a basic formula for the music on “The River, the Woods”, and from there the album never lets you go.

The opener is my favorite track on an almost perfect album, and it goes back to some of the themes of “Down and Out.” Five years earlier, our narrator was calling out for those who would love him. This time, he is the leader who will take us to where we will have those short bursts of life..

And hey look! More sailing and history metaphors.

“At the palace in Versailles, preparing for a long trip, that they may not survive, and many of them know this, but they would rather die than to leave the question open… A sinking ship is still a ship till the captain spoke the obit, till the crew has flew and crow’s nest slips beneath the ocean. We set sail without an anchor. We count upon that never stop. An anchor is just a coffin nail, waiting for the hammer drop.”

The link between the personal and the history is clearer here than it was on the last album, and perhaps that is what is helping this album find an audience. It is his first album that charted on Billboard, getting into the top 50 in hip-hop and heatseekers. As great as Pomegranate was, it’s not always easy to connect to. This is an album that you can head bang to, nerd out to, and deeply connect with.

As with Pomegranate, there’s a lot of American history to it. “Thomas Jefferson” is entirely based on this quote by TJ: “We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists, so that I might be able to have my endless supply of slave mistresses.” (Okay that last part was mine… I’m not a huge fan of TJ.)

This is an album by an artist who is celebrating not so much history and science as ideas, but artistry and independence. The scared kid seeing the city has found that creative spirit at long last. This is an album about that creative spirit, and where it takes you for better and for worse.

ASTRONAUTALIS: This is our Science is a record all about me. All true stories about me, things from my life, particularly my life in the last 8 years. I am coming to the conclusion that I am going to do this the rest of my life. And that means that I’m never gonna have a regular life, regular path. This is an album about what that means to me. It’s not rah-rah. There are complications and sacrifices. I’ll never have health insurance, a family, a home. I’ll never have a regular friendship, a relationship with people… This record was about coming to that conclusion, coming to that core, and making my own path in the world.

Read that, and then listen to this album straight through. Preferably on vinyl, if that’s an option for you. I will highlight two more songs, but then I’ll stop, as I could go all day.

It’s not the highlight of this album, but I feel obligated to talk about it. Tegan Quinn contributed vocals to “Contrails”, and it appears to have finally put Astronautalis in the mainstream spotlight at some level. This one is pretty lyrically dense, but you can grab a lot from this line: “What kind of fool is so stupid to climb a mountain, then climb back down to town without a picture to prove it?’

Still, if there’s a song that could really become a hit on this album, to my mind it’s the penultimate track, “Secrets on our Lips.” “Secrets on our Lips” may well be the most straightforward song in Astronautalis’s entire catalogue. No historical metaphors, no surreal imagery, no knotty wordplay. It’s a song about a passionate hook up. It’s a classic love song, punctuated by some explicit images, a little bit of humor, and a grand, dramatic arrangement.

Here’s a wonderful version from Santos Party House in Manhattan. Featuring a live band! (Doesn’t always happen with Bothwell’s shows.)