Everyone knows that LA is a cesspit. A parched city encumbered by the weight of it’s own excess. Autolux, however, are a spindly shaft of optimism coursing through it’s darkness. Hunched down over the recording equipment of their downtown studio Space 23, they’ve concocted a heady brew of lo-fi, highly detailed and lovingly aching art pop. Transit Transit disregards it’s birthplace’s aesthetic obsessions, scrapes the faux-gloss away with incongruous nails, and looks for beauty buried somewhere further than skin deep.
Six years ago debut Future Perfect touted the group as purveyors of considerable sonic asset. Now, after record label displacement and further sonic progression, Transit Transit looks set to continue the arc ever upwards. Crafted through the band’s allegiance to field recordings (the title track’s built around a recording of a freezer door slamming), vintage synthesizers and the merging of individual strengths, they’ve created an ebullient record that ranges from apocalyptic to apologetic with considerable ease.
It’s not unfounded to say the band are influenced by My Bloody Valentine or Sonic Youth - that escalating hypertension of white noise looped in on itself like an Escher drawing - but it’s a tag that’s used lazily when people hear distortion and effects. They’re altogether much more punctilious than any of their musical forebears. And this is the band’s album, their individual talent coalescing into a unified attack on the senses, or, on Transit Transit’s more downbeat numbers, the creation of nuanced moods, longing, or dreamlike thoughts.
With the majority of songs addressed to a faceless ‘you’, the detachment of the personal pronoun reflects the band’s oblique engagement with sound and voice. Lyrically coded and musically saturnalian, the album fits and starts infrequently, but always pulses with purpose. On ‘Supertoys’ the boy’s androgynous harmonies are counterpoised against the lush husk of Carla Azar’s delivery, whilst the title track’s freezer door slam, hinge click and barely tuned piano chords lends it the air of an Orwellian dystopia.
That’s not to say Autolux sound solely bleak, ‘Bouncing Wall’ radiates warmth, enunciating midnight camp fire sing-alongs with it‘s oscillating frog synths and throaty booze breaths, whilst ‘Audience No.2’ main lyric spits “I have always been your vegetable/are you my Swedenborg?” in reference to the Swedish scientist of the same name. With uppers comes downers though, but ‘Spots’ soporific dissonance is the sole blemish on an otherwise, elated record.
Like we said, optimistic. Six years and a thousand different problems later, Autolux are still crafting quite extraordinary sounds amid the bleak sparseness of a vapid and faceless city, and the crumbling ruins of an industry that sparkled crystal like when they set that first apprehensive foot forwards all those years ago. If you're looking for things to be thankful for, here's as good a start as any. - Alex Hibbert
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