Remember the first time you saw fireworks? Your (probably) child eyes agape and drinking in that mesmerising display of pyrotechnical magic. Maybe you even said "wow". It's possible you were just as enthralled watching fireworks for the second time. How about the 50th time? Or the 100th? Even as, for the most part, a shoegaze layman, listening to
Whitenoise Superstar feels a bit like seeing fireworks for the 1000th time. Sure it's bright and loud and has a reasonable degree of spectacle but its difficult to ignore the internal voice asking exactly why we have to sit (for over an hour) through something so familiar that its difficult to recall what appealed about it in the first place.
Astrobrite, brainchild of seminal My Bloody Valentine fan Scott Cortez, prefer their shoegaze noisy and sun-bleached; they certainly build a wall of noise on
Whitenoise Superstar, and in several parts of the album such as the almost brass-like guitar blares on "Vanilla Blue" and the latter part of eventually-decent closing track "Kiss Peach" bear down on the listener like a unfiltered ultraviolet ray to the naked skin, but even these highlights either take far too long to arrive or meander tediously. The tone of outstayed welcomes is set immediately by the opening track which is comfortably twice as long as it deserves to be. For every intoxicating high reached by the sheets of drenching feedback, for very long stretches
Whitenoise Superstar's noise wall resembles more of a noise plasterboard, one which you might imagine yourself putting your fist through out of sheer boredom.
The sometimes androgynous vocals are a mixed bag, mostly sounding a bit like the kind of nonsense cooing and babbling like from a mother to their newborn child, something which probably has wholesome appeal to someone out there but personally mostly resembled awkward overshares of embarrassing intimate moments. Some of the more kinetic vocal lines like the soaring croons in "Cherryflavor Burst" and sentimental wails in "Summertime Smiley" (which are, other than the aforementioned climax of the closing track, pretty much the only good part of the nigh useless second half of the album) achieve a degree of euphoria but are spread thin throughout the album's unjustified length.
Maybe it's just because typing out the track names is very irritating, but something should also be said about the obnoxious way the band attempts to append some sorely lacking personality onto the album. Even ignoring the myspace edge-phase profile picture of the cover art, the track titles - reminiscent of poorly translated vape flavours - don't come off as cute or endearing but contrived; the colours, tastes and textures that are promised mostly fall flat when held up against how the songs actually sound. This may be an insignificant detail to note but it does seem a striking backhanded acknowledgement from the band that the cuts here are for the most part painfully generic.
One way Astrobrite opt to differentiate themselves somewhat within what was surely a very stale genre in 2007 is with drum and bass/breakcore influenced programmed beats on several of the tracks. The results are... inoffensive. Frantic snare and hi-hat features prominently on "Cherryflavor Burst" which is one if the better tracks, but if it had been replaced with more traditional percussion or even nothing at all the difference in song quality would be negligible. The haphazard application of these beats throughout the album essentially proves their non-effect on the album's equation; they don't save tracks like the dull "Amorotic Zoom" and they don't provide any cohesion to the disjointed "Summertime Smiley".
Keeping comparisons skyward, if the tracks on this album were clouds and you were laid on the grass doing the "hey that cloud looks like a..." thing, there's a good chance you wouldn't point at any of these tracks because they just look like clouds. Everyone knows that clouds aren't bad, but most of them don't receive a second thought. Of course the argument will exist that the droning, lingering and meditative qualities of the album are what crystallises its dreamlike appeal, and to be sure just like most dreams
Whitenoise Superstar is immediately forgettable.
