Presently touring with Clinic, Autoflux are rumoured to be one of the sharpest recent finds on the LA music scene and have already notched up performances with a dizzying array of music radicals: The White Stripes, the Breeders, Tortoise, Broadcast, and Blonde Redhead. Not that the band is as pasty and fresh-faced as you might imagine, all three members having cut their teeth on a fine old oddment of art and experimental projects in the last 10 years. Vocalist and bass player Eugene Goreshter played in the neo-psychedelic grunge shakers Maids Of Gravity (who scored acclaim with the hallucinogenic “Only Dreaming“ album in 1995 and had an album produced by the Velvet Underground’s John Cale) whilst bare-footed drummer Carla Azar has worked with Vincent Gallo and the Indigo Girls-style Ednaswap who wrote and composed the original version of Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Torn’. Quite mysterious, eh?
What else should we know about them? They produce all their own artwork, Eugene speaks Russian fluently, Carla plays the drums barefoot and has a technologically reconstituted elbow courtesy of an accident some time ago and they’ve gone and produced one of the best and most outrageously old-school alternative albums this year.
Taking cues from Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins, Can, My Bloody Valentine and Mercury Rev Autoflux are a timely intervention in the finely coiffured landscape of designer rock. Whilst the Strokes splay their feet, practise die-hard garage-chic and glide to the next isle of the boutique with their beautiful girlfriends, Autolux plug in their guitars and just let rip with rattling squawks and feedback. The fact that there’s a gritty melodic vein of sophistication about it seems almost incidental. ‘Future Perfect’ takes us back to the days when indie fans were strange, alienated and not to be trusted with your neighbour’s ten year old daughter, a freakish celebration of all that is squalid, paranoid, hallucinogenic and warped. ‘Great Days For The Passenger Element’ being a case in point: somnambulistic, chemical-enhanced vocal, stuttering drum patterns, murmuring guitars and splendidly cacophonous psychedelia – not unlike show mates Broadcast in their literate, retro grooviness and similarly not unlike stoner godfathers, Sonic Youth in their sheer ‘difficultness’ (Robots In The Garden’). It’s obvious why the Breeders took them on tour, they have that same gift for melody and that same gift for unsettling it. ‘Turnstile Blues’s swaggering, spaced-out beats, the ruminating basslines, the faintly androgynous but sweetly whispered vocals – pure Kim Deal. ‘Angry Candy’s cryptic, David Lynch-era surf guitar pure Pixies noise. Another less well documented influence would be Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, in that the record paints strikingly surreal and eerie sonic pictures with their surplus of noise and triggers.
Too many good tracks to namecheck each one, so just go out and buy it. It’s the most brave and reassuring thing to happen in indie music for some time. A Chris Cunningham video and a UK release on Warp and they’ll be sorted, trust me..
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