Whatever one thinks of “Pepper” and the Butts’ accommodations to the musical mainstream, the band was not entirely somnolent in the mid-1990s. See for instance their performance of “Ulcer Breakout” on The Larry Sanders Show; true to that show’s sensibility, the Butts played a sort of cartoon version of themselves, but you can also see attempts to acknowledge the limits of the cartoon. And Electriclarryland includes traces of the feral, forceful band the Butts had been: the big guitars in “Birds,” the off-kilter echo and reverb of “My Brother’s Wife,” the occasional upsetting image in the verbal slurry of “The Lord Is a Monkey.” None of that comes close to the giddy horrors and uncanny weirdness you might find on any randomly selected minute from Rembrandt Pussyhorse (1986) or Double Live (1989), but there are moments that reach up through Electriclarryland’s slick production with grubby, smelly, quivering fingers.

There are scant few such grubby quivers on After the Astronaut. The band skims the surface of the period’s American pop, drawing on Puff Daddy-inspired hip hop — an aesthetic nadir in the form — and the groove-oriented nu metal that would soon implode at Woodstock 99. Lots of thumping drum machines, warbly synths and smoked-out idiocy. To be sure, the Butts were already smoked out by 1982, and then, the hallucinations felt dangerous. Give “Cherub” a spin, for a refresher, then try to make it through all of “Mexico,” from After the Astronaut. Gibby intones, “God Zeus Allah Buddha / Bob Dylan on a motor scooter.” Is it supposed to be “surreal”? Is it supposed to be “satiric”? Whatever the intent, the images are empty, the accompanying sounds affectless. While promo chatter suggests that the Butts found After the Astronaut “too abrasive” upon finishing it, one wonders what record they were listening to, or just how listlessly high they were while listening.

We won’t linger long on the sordid topic of the band’s various substance habits. But it may be moderately enlightening that the best track on After the Astronaut is “I Don’t Have a Problem.” The repeating vocal samples initially suggest a gendered theme; an uncredited female voice says, “I don’t have a problem with any of it,” while another voice, sounding like Gibby’s, asserts, “These girls, they got knives, man, for other women.” In the background, there are snatches of dramatic organ and stretches of what sounds like bad plumbing, laboring away (it all recalls “Strangers Die Everyday”). It’s not revelatory, but it’s a bummer with some weight, the bad vibes growing heavier as the song continues. Suggestively, another feminine voice intones, “Drugs and alcohol,” here and there in the track.

Do we have a problem? Maybe more than one? Certainly something happened in the Butts’ life as a band, somewhere between Widowermaker! (1989) and Independent Worm Saloon (1993), between “Bong Song” and “Alcohol.” In the 1980s, the band made possessed, ugly, often thrilling music — music one makes because there is no other choice. It’s music this reviewer admires very much, and still plays. By the time of “Cough Syrup,” or of “Mexico,” the unpleasantness in the Butts’ music seemed to have more to do with commodifying the cultural residue of venal behaviors, by choice.

That might have made a kind of sense in 1998, with the Clinton administration descending into its own crass, venal crises and implementing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. Ruthless exploitation was baked into the social fabric, and one shouldn’t be surprised that Clinton and his gang of neolibs were willing to sell out the country’s vulnerable people for some political capital. In that context, one might usefully choose to make music that responds incisively, with precise negations. Some will demur: the Butts were never a politically didactic band. That’s so, but for some time they didn’t need to be. The way they lived and toured constituted challenges to nearly everything most Americans might have recognized as socially coherent and morally good.

In “Weird Revolution,” the opening and among the most insufferable tracks on After the Astronaut, a blustery speaker addresses a mass of freaks and weirdos in “open revolt” against a “cruel, normal society.” The song’s imagined situation ironizes speeches by earlier, more veraciously intended folks: Fred Hampton and Bernadine Dohrn come to mind. The song’s speaker thanks a certain “Dr Leary” for the invitation to address the revolutionary weirdos; that could be Gibby’s joshing reference to Paul Leary, but it could more fittingly refer to Tim Leary, who encouraged the freaks of the late 1960s to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” Retreat from the plane of social conflict and get high. Quietist nonsense, like, one is sad to report, most of this record.