3 out of 5

Label: Skin Graft Records

Produced by: Rick Pelletier (recorded by)

A couple of years after Arab on Radar disbanded, we started to see offshoots from the various bandmembers – Eric Paul and Craig Kureck in Chinese Stars; Jeff Schneider in Made in Mexico; and then guitarist Stephen Mattos in Athletic Automaton. And just as you can trace the bands and styles that influenced AoR but – at least I – cannot name a single band who sound even remotely like them in their final form, the sound proved so indelible as to carry on into pretty much every side project thereafter. That suggests that each bandmember brought equal weight to the project, leading to Chinese Stars being the dancey offshoot, and Made in Mexico having a harder line groove, but both really, really sounding linked to AoR. And Athletic Automaton…? Well, they would evolve, but much like Stars’ debut, this initial outing pretty much sounded like a refigured Arab on Radar, somewhat watered down to sketches of songs.

Drummer Pat Crump helps bring a solid, Zeppelin-esque bombast to things (as opposed to Kureck’s more panciked thumping), and somewhat aligned the approach to that of the two-man Big Business – fuzzy, stoner-adjacent riffs – but the fretwork is still undeniably noodly AoR style squiggles, the shouted vocals mostly feeling like an afterthought.

To be clear, this combo makes for definite grooves, but even with some tracks 7 or 8-minutes long, it sounds more like Crump and Mattos working out their identity than delivering a wholly polished final product.

A years-later Skin Graft reissue includes a couple of bonus tracks that are presumably from around the same era as the original album (Death on an Escalator certainly is, appearing in a non-live form on a single), and so slot right in to the above criticisms, though a new mastering from Weasel Walter dusts this off to sound a lot newer than it was.