After the Astronaut

<b>Decades after they aborted mission, their weird revolution is back on.</b> <i>After the Astronaut</i> is a do-over 28 years in the making. The album was intended to be the follow-up to the Butthole Surfers’ 1996 album <i>Electriclarryland</i>—which spawned the alt-rap earworm “Pepper”—but even that fluke hit didn’t buy the Texan provocateurs creative carte blanche with their Capitol Records bosses. After the album got held up in label limbo, the band gave the majority of the tracks a production spit-shine and released them in 2001 as <i>Weird Revolution</i>, into a post-nu-metal alterna-culture that had turned less receptive to the Buttholes’ brand of acid-spiked absurdity. But hearing the original artefact decades later, it boggles the mind as to why this was considered unreleasable at the time: What we hear on <i>After the Astronaut</i> is a veteran noise-punk band successfully adapting to the trip-hop and electronic aesthetics that were permeating modern-rock radio in the late ’90s. Sure, a record that opens with a megaphoned Gibby Haynes delivering a spoken-word rallying cry for a “weird revolution” over a Madchester rhythm may not have been the easiest sell to the masses, and the album is hardly lacking for bizarro beat-driven experiments with names like <b>“Junkie Jenny in Gaytown”</b>. But if the label was hoping for another “Pepper”, the Buttholes were willing to play ball: It’s not too hard to imagine an alternate universe where shuffle-grooved sing-alongs like <b>“Intelligent Guy”</b> and <b>“Jet Fighter”</b> are lighting up the <i>TRL</i> request line.