"What's this shitty place?" Portland punks the Mean Jeans make a strong case that life can feel banal and unfortunate after you've explored the final frontier. But for dudes suffering from post-astral depression, their guitars sound elated. With an absurdly quick pace, they deliver a huge earworm melody with some "woah-oh" vocals that those Japandroids boys could endorse. The Jeans boys (Billy Jeans, Jeans Wilder, and Junior Jeans) throw out nearly every trick in the anthem book: soaring guitar solos, swooning Joey Ramone vocals, a sing-along chorus, etc. And when their space race daydreams have run their course, they cap the track off with a weirdly perfect appropriation of the central riff from Tom Petty's "Runnin' Down a Dream".

[from the Mean Jeans/Big Eyes split 7", out December 18 on Dirtnap]