Aaron Lee Tasjan makes horny, queer cosmic American music that treats the Beatles as a core roots band. His most upbeat songs — like “Lost & Alone” on his new release, Get Over It, Underdog — hit with the soaring sheen of a smarter, more jaded Full Moon Fever-era Tom Petty. “Here comes a runaway train / Of thought that’s breaking my brain,” Tasjan sings with his distinctive nasal burr, all jangle uplift and jittery neurosis.
Beyond that irresistible track, though, the album doesn’t have the same glamorous alien space queen swagger as 2024’s glitter-fueled, defiantly bisexual Stellar Evolution. Instead, it substitutes a melancholy minor-key warble and throb. “Shiver,” for example, has to be one of the most downbeat stripper songs ever. Rather than booty-banging fun and sexual conquest, the dirgelike psychedelia and dissonantly warped guitar solo underpin a tale of sleaze, voyeurism, and disconnected failure: “'Let’s have fun’ / She says as she straddles / Another drunk.” Tasjan is the guy watching the girl and hoping to understand her, even as he knows that hoping to understand her is itself part of the scuzzy economy of lust and power he is simultaneously bathing in and repulsed by.
