Every day, in every regard, humankind becomes less important: Sometime soon, 10,000 computers working in unison are going to create the best dance-floor track imaginable without the subtlest hint of organic involvement. Fortunately, Denmark's The Asteroids Galaxy Tour offers a preview of this future on its latest record, Out of Frequency. Some will lament the loss of the human touch, while the rest of us will welcome our robot overlords and only hope that every dance song can accrue to the level of incendiary excitement achieved in "Fantasy Friend Forever."
The Asteroids Galaxy Tour is not, in fact, an army of robots. But its core members — Mette Lindberg on vocals and Lars Iversen as producer — certainly seem to revel in all the options that modern technology affords them. Lindberg's vocals are highly treated so that she sounds vaguely alien, while Iversen surrounds her in a wash of instruments, most of them synthesized.
Sounding like Madness on nitrous, "Fantasy Friend Forever" is animated by horn touches that equally recall Motown soul and the soundtrack to an Xbox 360. The otherworldly effect could one day enslave whole nations by dint of its sheer infectiousness. The Asteroids Galaxy Tour is less a formal band than an amalgam of humanity and machines surrounding Iversen and Lindberg. For those traditionalists pining for an "authentic" band, Lindberg triumphantly rejoins in the first line of "Fantasy Friend Forever," "Yeah, I like it a lot, 'cause it feels like the real thing."
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