Where Astronauts Go To Hide used to be a band from Minnesota; as of June, 2010, the brainchild of guitarist and songwriter Josh Pederson is called Holyoke, hailing from Chicago. But just as Mark Kozelek will always be Sun Kil Moon by a different name, Astronauts can't escape their roots as a coffee-house rip-off of Okkervil River which would somehow seem more genuine as a comic strip homage in Questionable Content.
No lie: about a minute and a half into my first listen of Where Astronauts Go To Hide's final album under that name, Amongst Friends, I paused the music to check Wikipedia: did Will Scheff have a self-indulgent side project that I didn't know about?
Amongst Friends is a floor to ceiling study of Okkervil River's stylings: simple acoustic strums, muted string arrangements, carefully out-of-tune howling, lyrics literate to a fault. But whereas Scheff and Co. have spent a decade building a unique sound and developing the skill to work effectively within those confines, Astronauts are new to this game and it shows. 'Be Patient' sounds like a throwaway cut off of Black Sheep Boy, the cartoonish moralizing of 'Maggie' undercuts the album's most engaging instrumentation and gives an example of the obtuse lyricism that mars Amongst Friends ("The running blood of an economy's enduring slumber/but only the business district's sleeping soundly"). 'Between Theologians and Scientists' is an example of the angsty, unfocused imagery that makes Astronauts sound more like Bright Eyes circa 1999 than Okkervil River circa 2009, and I won't even touch the whistle solo of 'Great Lakes and Greater Lays'.
I'm not denying that Pederson is a competent songwriter and a great chameleon, nor that the album features some nice, safe instrumentation and a few clever lines. It can be thrown on in the background for any variety of activities, but that's just it: Amongst Friends is throwaway music. You've heard a dozen bands do the same thing better. That it hails from a new city and clocks in under 30 minutes is no reason to cheer.
On Astronauts' Facebook page (which they continue to use despite the name change), Josh writes of a 2007 meeting with soon-to-be-bandmate Rachel Kahn, "marking the beginning of a genre transformation: from a dark, experimental sound to a more traditional folk style." Here's to hoping Holyoke digs back into the dark, experimental sound for a minute or two; their debut album under that name might contain a few more genuine moments, and cause a few less trips to the Wiki.
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