The world has always been a bit messy and mad, but today we find ourselves in especially messy and maddening times. If we were to find a bright side to all this, it would be that the mess and the madness generate a lot of material for the artistically inclined; and if we are indeed heading to hell in a handbasket, at least we'll have a lot of quality stuff to read and listen to on the way.

Casualite, the full-length debut from the Denver four-piece Astrophagus, is yet another creative endeavor born out of this overwhelming sense of exasperation and disenfranchisement, and assembled through traditional means as well as those which reflect our fractured, increasingly digitized society: tape loops, computer-generated effects, electronic drums. The question is, what is Casualite's contribution to an audience of exasperated and disenfranchised listeners? What exactly does it do that all the similarly engendered novels and plays and albums of recent years do not? Does it make any more sense of things? Does it offer any more company in misery?

In a word, no. Casualite is little more than a rehashing of grumpy platitudes and compose-by-numbers music. After a piano intro meant to set some kind of cinematic mood, the first words we hear are, "This feels so old/ Everything is bought and sold/ Everything has got a price/ That is how we all get by." Even if this weren't doggerel masquerading as something profound ("Dude, that is so true"), it isn't helped by Jason Cain's vocals, which are painfully flat and karaoke-like and, beyond that, seesaw between complete apathy and self-conscious histrionics. It's as if he's desperately trying to find some real meaning in what he's singing, so by default he puts all his emotional emphasis on the last word in a line.

When the music is put together with standard instruments, it's your standard emo or sub-metal fare. When put together electronically, it's just variations on a theme. "Square Parts of Houses" is divvied up evenly into two parts, one mostly electronic, the other a more traditional guitar-bass-drum format. The first half is a radio or television broadcast loop and some rhythmic electronic sounds that establish the melody. Gradually this segues into a fuzzy, guitar-driven, rhyming (natch) rant about all of us dying before our time. The following track, "Never Happen," is another television loop -- except this time the band brings in the electronic sounds before the broadcast loop and leaves off the closing rant. The running time for each of these tracks is two-and-a-half minutes, and presumably this is what the band is referring to when they pride themselves on "truncated song structures." I think them's fancy city slicker words for "short songs." Then we come to "Consult the List," where Cains tunelessly groans, "Scumbags of the world, unite!/ I am too tired to fight" while his band cranks out a tune that every high school garage band in the country has experimented with at one time or another. And so it goes, track after track, for forty minutes.

As relentlessly negative as all that might sound, Casualite isn't an atrocity. "The Risk of Birth Defects" has a good beginning (unfortunately, as if its title were tastelessly suggestive, it fails to develop), and there are some clever uses of ambient effects, such as the staccato blips and taps of "Threshold." But the album is beset by a rank amateurism that is impossible to ignore because the band takes its material and its mission so seriously. Rather than make sense of the world's mess and madness, Casualite can only offer listeners rhyming pabulum set to a second-rate soundtrack. – Eric J. Iannelli (2006, The Daily Copper)