Flickerstick
Welcoming Home the Astronauts
Epic

VH1's "Bands on the Run," which placed four touring rock groups in an elimination tournament for a record contract, achieved a great balance of reality television elements. Since thousands of starry-eyed, guitar-toting misfits are traversing the country at this very moment, the concept wasn't horribly contrived. The situation wasn't entirely mundane either, as most Americans will never hit the road in a broken-down van filled with amp stacks and fast food wrappers. As reality television dies out in the wake of our post-WTC reality check, "Bands on the Run" may be remembered as everything the genre could be: empty, addictive, guilty pleasure.

The stars of the show were the hard-partying Texans of Flickerstick, a cross between every non-fatal cliché pioneered by the Who and a night at the Revenge of the Nerds Alpha Beta House. Their hotel room trashing, gear bashing, junk talking, in-fighting, heavy-boozing, groupie-bedding, toe-licking, jock-star escapades made for fascinating car-wreck viewing, so it seemed right when they emerged victorious.

With the show a memory, Flickerstick now presents a more permanent record of its existence, Welcoming Home the Astronauts. The "corporate rock" tag their "…on the Run" rivals saddled them with turns out to be appropriate. The band's aesthetic must have developed organically, but the sound of Astronauts could have been a megacorp's exercise in modern day niche marketing.

The band sounds specifically engineered for the listener who's outgrown faceless sub-Matchbox 20 modern rock, but still wrinkles his nose at even pre-Kid A Radiohead as "too weird." The general formula is middle-of-the-road songwriting layered with U2-inspired bloat and some alternative or indie-rock window dressing. Many of the songs sport overblown choruses — as if someone hit the "hook" button on the Studio Magic machine — ending up like lowest-common-denominator Sugar Ray twaddle with a hint of the histrionics that give the lightweight division of emocore a bad name. Most songs are lacquered in the modern sheen of Bends-lite delay guitar atmospherics. Even imagewise, frontstick Brandin Lea appears as he did on the show, like a pale photocopy of an old Kill Rock Stars promo pic of Elliott Smith.

Flickerstick is at its best when working counter to its members' expansive instincts, as on the understated opening of "Smile" and much of moody bonus track "Execution by Christmas Lights." These nice moments don't even out the parts that induce cringes, such as the awkward hippie-ad reference ("I'd like to buy the world a Coke") in the chorus of "Coke." The somewhat clever stalker joke "Chloroform the One You Love" falls flat under a generic sing-song melody and bouncy New Wave-parody feel. Nothing here is damning, but the whole affair ultimately drifts by inoffensively and unmemorably.

After a season of television stardom, Flickerstick is in an enviable situation. Millions already have been exposed to the group's music, faces and personalities. But in this era of ever-accelerating pop culture and ominous More Serious Concerns, the group might've done better to crank out a quickie album to follow the finale of "Bands on the Run," while the public's memory was still fresh. As things stand, it's anybody's guess whether Astronauts will find its slot between the backwards-baseball cap set and the hornrim crowd.

— Wayne Lewis (capsighs@pacbell.net)