Man Or Astro-Man? - Experiment Zero [Orange]

By 1996 Man Or Astro-Man? had already exhausted most of what surf rock had to offer and moved on to something colder. Experiment Zero was their Touch and Go debut and the moment the Auburn, Alabama quartet stopped being a very good reverb band and started being a science-fiction one — sixteen instrumentals of chrome-plated guitar, vintage test-equipment samples and drum patterns that sound like they were programmed by something with more than two arms.

It is faster and meaner than anything they had made before. "Television Fission" and "Maximum Radiation Level" push the tempo past anything Dick Dale would have recognized. "King Of The Monsters" is the closest they ever came to a hit. "Anoxia" and "Z-X3" bury their melodies under layers of tremolo and tape hiss. Between tracks, disembodied voices read from filmstrips and civil-defense reels, and the whole record plays like a transmission picked up by accident.

Thirty years later it remains the entry point for anyone curious how a band could take the least fashionable genre in America and turn it into something genuinely alien. The vinyl edition closes with "The Space Alphabet," which appears nowhere on the CD.

Reissued by Touch and Go on orange vinyl.