Hurry Up, Autolux! Good Noise is Hard to Find
THIS STUNNING LOS Angeles trio’s Future Perfect dropped in 2004, but I still haven’t been able to get “Angry Candy” out of my head. You should put it in yours, and harass Autolux into confessing the release date for its 2008 follow-up Transit Transit. The year is getting shorter, and good noise is hard to find.
What Is(n’t) Shoegaze?
“Shoegaze is a dumb term made up by clueless NME idiots,” argues Mogwai’s Stuart Brathwaite, a My Bloody Valentine fan as well as a friend of its architect Kevin Shields. “It’s pretty demeaning as well. If someone called us shoegazers, I’d be pretty unhappy.”
For good reason. During the late ’80s and early ’90s, the term reductively compressed the dense feedback, droning riffage and ethereal soundtracking into slang and slag, especially in the British press. No doubt, its employ was a byproduct of the British press having fallen in love with the derivative Britpop of Oasis, as much as America had fallen in love with the derivative metal of grunge.
But in the end, it was used to describe bands like My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, Swervedriver and pretty much anyone else, like drone minimalists Spacemen 3, who didn’t fall into the comfortable confines of easily classifiable music.
That was its figurative objective.
Paul McCartney Brings ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ Back to the Future
“‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ is the ultimate future moment for The Beatles,” Autolux guitarist Greg Edwards told Wired.com last year, before the band’s drummer, Carla Azar, revised the song with The Kills’ Allison Mosshart for Zack Snyder’s techno-fantasy film flop Sucker Punch. “That song basically transcends time. It still lands years ahead of us, no matter when we hear it.”
Autolux Visualizes Arty ‘Science of Imaginary Solutions’
A GEOMETRIC MULTIVERSE of celestial monsters and drones with ice-cream-cone erections populate the imagery of art-rock band Autolux’s latest video.
In “The Science of Imaginary Solutions” animation director Thomas McMahan and artist Kill Pixie — known to his folks as Mark Whalen — get up to some weird business. The result looks nifty, but it’s kind of hard to actually figure out what it is.