My LA Times feature on Autolux came out one month after it was supposed to, and wound up online-only rather than print. I’m writing about it three days after I’d planned to, and doubt it will be linked, commented upon, or read beyond the four barnacled and bescarfed Silverlakians who read this blog and dig the band. May your beards be refulgent, sirs.
This outcome is consistent with a crew who took six years to finish their sophomore effort Transit Transit, and largely lost the locomotion they’d gathered in 2004, when they were the first local outfit to escape the dance-punk albatross of Aoki. Accuse this of being bluster and I will point you to thid Pitchfork review, that does everything but accuse Dim Mak of replacing Owens Valley water with Red Bull and Vodka.
In the indieocracy of 2010, Ima Robot have become Edward Sharpe & The Infant Sorrow and they make the Intelligentsia set weep into their six dollar mochas. The Silversun Pickups are getting that Billy Corgan money and everyone can agree on the Local Natives. As for Autolux, they turned in something too similar to their first album to elicit noise. They don’t have a Twitter, a Tumblr– by any blog buzz metric they are doomed. I suspect they don’t care and that’s for the best. Those who believed in FuturePerfect will probably dig the visions glimpsed when Jordan Catalano look-a-like Greg Edwards disappeared into the studio to loop dig like he was signed to Stones Throw.
Transit Transit is a good album dismissed for not being a great one. When you take over a half decade to deliver, people expect revolutions not minor renovations. The article weaves the tale of a group that started out getting compared to Sonic Youth, Blonde Redhead and My Bloody Valentine, and still do. No strange twists, but there are bad metaphors, the sounds of freezer doors from Copenhagen farmhouses, and T-Bone Burnett. If you disapprove, there is always hippie rehash or witch house to worship.–Weiss
Download:
MP3: Autolux-“Supertoys”
MP3: Autolux-“Audience No. 2”
From Future Perfect
MP3: Autolux-“Turnstile Blues”
