Autumn is a season of decline, a time when the environment powers down in preparation for the barren inactivity of winter. Vocalist/guitarist Matthew Kelly and guitarist Frank Koroshec may not have been thinking conceptually when they named their band the Autumns nearly a decade and a half ago - their Southern California surroundings aren’t exactly famous for dramatic seasonal shifts - and yet the Autumns seem aptly named considering their history.
The Autumns’ early drone shoegaze pop was marked by a moody darkness that matched the lengthening shadows and fleeting warmth of their seasonal namesake. And then the band shed members like a tree drops its leaves in the wake of their label’s demise at a juncture that should have marked the triumph of their sophomore album, 2000’s In the Russet Gold of This Vain Hour.
The Autumns’ new album, Fake Noise From a Box of Toys, is far removed from that period in both time and tone. In the void after the collapse of Risk Records in 2000, the Autumns persevered, shuffling personnel, touring as consistently as possible and finally releasing their eponymous third album in 2004. But changes were in the wind then as well.
“Whenever you’re touring material for a record for a long time, you start to get anxious,” says Autumns frontman Matthew Kelly. “When we were touring for the self-titled record, we started to feel trapped within that space artistically and started trying to break out of it. It’s a visceral kind of reaction. We started feeling more aggressive and we started pushing musically in a more aggressive direction, and I think that’s the basic impetus for the more aggressive sound.”
The Autumns have been artistically restless from the very start. Childhood friends Kelly and Koroshec assembled the band in 1994, attempting to reconcile their teenage adoration of the Manchester sound with their college exposure to My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth and the Cocteau Twins.
After attracting a diverse and loyal audience to their L.A. shows, the Autumns signed with fledgling Risk Records in 1997, resulting in their debut EP, Suicide at Strell Park, and their first full length, The Angel Pool, both of which generated a fair amount of acclaim at home and abroad. The Autumns cultivated an important fan overseas in the person of the Cocteau Twins’ Simon Raymonde, who heard demos through a Risk rep and inquired about the possibility of working with the band. Already big Cocteau followers, the band jumped at the opportunity to work with one of their sonic heroes.
The 2000 release of the Raymonde-produced Russet Gold could have been a turning point for the Autumns. The album generated incredibly positive press and the Autumns became the focus of a growing media interest. But long before the interest peaked, Risk closed up shop and with no further label support, Russet Gold faded away.
After the loss of original members Eric Crissman and Jon Santana, the Autumns remained undaunted and recorded several EPs and accepted an offer from filmmaker Angela Shelton to score her movie, Searching for Angela Shelton. After a four year studio hiatus, the Autumns finally recorded their self-titled third album, released in 2004 on Pseudopod. Once again, Kelly’s soaring falsetto and the Autumns’ compelling guitar drone captivated reviewers, earning four star reviews in Mojo and the Times of London. After so much career misfortune, it might have seemed tempting for the Autumns to follow the acclaim afforded their third album with more of the same, but that’s not in their creative genes. When the band began work on Fake Noise, their previous releases had little impact on the new material.
“We’re happy if people like it, of course, but the response has no effect on what we do,” says Kelly. “Listening to Fake Noise, I can understand how someone might think, ‘Oh, they’ve retained certain elements of the old sound and brought new elements in.’ But when we were writing it, I think we were working on a more abstract level. We wanted to identify any rules that we had been following. Whenever you make anything artistically, you’re always following a set of rules, and there’s a logic to what you’re doing. You’re not normally conscious of it, you just follow these rules subconsciously. We wanted to step back and figure out our artistic habits and try to break those habits, on the theory that the creative impulse that causes you to create in the first place is untamed and unrestrained and could go in any direction...but when you make records for years, you start channeling it in certain directions without realizing it.”
As a result, Fake Noise stands as a testament to the Autumns’ success in retaining the sounds that attracted fans and critics alike while incorporating a more confrontational element into their mix. The quintet (Kelly, Koroshec, guitarist Ken Tighe, bassist Dustin Morgan, drummer Steve Elkins) maintained their standard writing style of complete collaboration on ideas each individual brought in, and adopted their new mindset within that process.
“We were still doing things the same way in that respect, but we had all five brains focused on this idea of ‘If I catch you doing anything boilerplate, stock Autumns, I’m going to call you on it,’” says Kelly. “It was still the same environment, we just had this consciousness about trying to break these rules.”
A lot of bands at this kind of stylistic crossroads will go back and reexamine the influences that comprised their early work, but Kelly notes that wasn’t necessary for the Autumns.
“Because we’ve been doing it as long as we’ve been doing it, there are some influences that are permanently in our bloodstream and part of our musical DNA, like the Cocteau Twins and Stone Roses,” says Kelly. “But a lot of things we’ve been listening to for years - punk rock oriented and noisier, avant garde kinds of things, like Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu - took a lot of time to enter our musical bloodstream. You could listen to something for five years and nobody would ever know it from hearing the record you made. Some of those influences finally began to get into the stream of what we were doing on the new record. One critic overseas, I think for Rock Louder, called ‘Clem,’ the third song on the record, ‘Shellac covering Big Star,’ which I thought was really astute, because we’ve been listening to Shellac forever but this is the first time that even hints at that. ”
Although the Autumns’ shift to the more aggressive sound of Fake Noise was achieved on a more organic level, Kelly admits that he senses a conscious change in direction with this album. Listeners will be hearing a lot more of the bold new Autumns in the future. “You can hear this sort of transition,” says Kelly. “There are things on the record that could have been on earlier Autumns records, and then there’s things like ‘Clem’ and “The Beautiful Boot’ and ‘Glass Jaw,’ that are clearly pushing a more angular, aggressive direction, but they’re still melodic and I think they’re still pretty. I think that’s the breakthrough element of the record. It’s hard to say, but from where I’m sitting now, this seems like a new direction for the band. That collision between fierceness and beauty is something that I feel like I’m not seeing in a lot of other places, and something that we’re doing that’s kind of unique. That makes it exciting and that makes it something we want to pursue.”
--Brian Baker [April 28, 2008]
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The Autumns’ Fake Noise From a Box of Toys is out now on Bella Union/Worlds Fair Records.
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