Autolux

Transit Transit

 

Listening to Autolux is a lot like remembering that one lover whose impact you can never shake. Memories are triggered, the movies in your mind are re-edited the way you want to remember them, and then right when you’re at the height of your sequestered joy, the album—like that object of your desire—ends. Then you have to wait years to be caressed by the next installment.

Autolux have built their reputation on an aesthetic that has all the properties of a well-thought mixtape, able to convey assorted atmospheric shades and emotional contexts, without coming off as clever or bombastic. Transit Transit, the follow-up to 2004’s similarly majestic Future Perfect, doesn’t stray from the intended path, offering sonic action painting, narcotic dreamscapes and other manifestations of sonic bliss that you simply cannot divine from any band currently operating. The cumulative effect of drummer Carla Azar, guitarist Greg Edwards and bassist Eugene Goreshter massages your temporal lobes better than top-shelf absinthe or discerning opiates.

“Census” is the best song Sonic Youth forgot to write, peppered with shoegazer menace, detuned guitars and seemingly discorporate vocals. The arcane “High Chair” will appeal to all those minimal-wave aficionados with its clicking drum machine patterns, despite its lack of synthesizers. “Supertoys” straddles a parallel universe where the late psychedelic overlord/Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett manipulates a light show across the sky before heading off into the greater universe. “Headless Sky” is an alluring mix of askew harmonics and Azar’s tightly controlled percussive bursts, the equivalent to that halfway point between consciousnesses and comforting sleep. The six-minute closer “The Science Of Imaginary Solutions” is the perfect aural denouement to summarize the various emotional highs and lows of the past 40 minutes.

And that’s the beauty of Autolux: In an age where music fans want the immediate fix, the call-out research hook and/or a tune to simply hum, it’s great to hear a band who aren’t afraid to take you places you’ve never been to for a period of time. They just need to come by more often.

TBD http://www.tbdrecords.com

“Headless Sky”