The Autumns
Fake Noise From a
Box of Toys
Bella Union
By Jose Fritz
This album first came out in October of last year. This review commemorates the long-awaited US-release of the album. Of course with the advent of the internet, quaint concepts like release dates have become as out-dated as the rotary phone, the fax machine and the Geneva convention. It’s interesting to be reviewing a record over 7 months old. Were this band as productive as say Bishop Allen I’d be at least 6 EPs behind the curve. Fortunately for me The Autumns are a tad more conventional: a band that controls their appetites.
In the earliest stages of senescence bands find their identity. But after 10 years this is a band that feels to be in motion and not fortifying their position. I was serviced the “Boy with the Aluminum Stilts” single back in 1999. It says something prescient that the magazine I wrote for in those days no longer exists but The Autumns still do.
They’ve experimented in the interval, broadened themselves you might say. They did an EP of 1950s inspired love songs and released it on pink-colored vinyl. Then they did an EP covering songs by Nick Drake, Morrissey among others. In 2004 they scored the film Searching for Angela Shelton. They’ve kept themselves occupied.
The delicate details make this band. You can hear the stick control on “Clem” when he drops the drum stick and allows it to bounce naturally, but a-rhythmically for half a measure then wrestles control away from the gravitational pull of earth. His will defeats the six sextillion metrictons of inanimate inertia. It puts a pause into the pace of the measure and moves the emphasis to the words the instant time catches back up. The maneuver is subtle, careful and calculated. Songs like “Killer in Drag” and “Glass Jaw” are just highly polished little gems of falsetto guitar rock.
You could say they’ve made some subtle changes… if the difference between a glass and a frosty glass is subtle. So what does a decade of subtlety gain them? They’ve put out four LPs, five EPs and another four singles in a decade of disciplined productivity. What is the significance of a great band that is continually overlooked, always underrated and under-estimated? They have had no break-out radio single, no notable magazine covers, no award-winning video nor banned album art.
Their significance will be in their legacy. The future equivalent of crate diggers will be coming across this and their back catalog and argue its contextual significance. Who influenced them? Who did they influence? Many great bands have befallen this fate, Dropsonic, Helms, Very Pleasant Neighbor, Tad and others. They are not doomed, only relegated to mix tapes and snobby references in overtly self-conscious record reviews. Sic transit gloria mundi.
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