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Back in the mid-90s, childhood friends Frankie Koroshec and Matthew Kelly began swapping records and exchanging notes on their musical idols. Most prominent among them were the Manchester lot, the Smiths and Stone Roses especially. As aspiring guitarists, Koroshec and Kelly would spend hours untangling Johnny Marr's impossible webs of jangling genius, often to little avail. As any current Autumns listener can detect, however, the exercise helped forge the duo's musical mindset.
As with many American youths, college proved a Pandora's box of artistic exposure for Koroshec and Kelly. Among ot ...read more
Back in the mid-90s, childhood friends Frankie Koroshec and Matthew Kelly began swapping records and exchanging notes on their musical idols. Most prominent among them were the Manchester lot, the Smiths and Stone Roses especially. As aspiring guitarists, Koroshec and Kelly would spend hours untangling Johnny Marr's impossible webs of jangling genius, often to little avail. As any current Autumns listener can detect, however, the exercise helped forge the duo's musical mindset.
As with many American youths, college proved a Pandora's box of artistic exposure for Koroshec and Kelly. Among others, the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth were thrown generously into the mix. The two were soon compelled to strike out on their own. They conscripted several musician friends to begin playing shows around Los Angeles. In short order, The Autumns had drawn their various influences together to create a unique and identifiable sound -- one that drew an eclectic mod-to-goth spectrum of twenty-somethings out to LA nightclubs in droves. In 1997, the budding but ill-fated Risk Records signed the group, releasing an EP (Suicide at Strell Park) and full-length album (The Angel Pool). Both were warmly received. Flipside deemed The Angel Pool a "hypnotic pop masterpiece" and CMJ called the band "an enlightening unit that knows its past but pushes toward the future." The record eventually generated waves big enough to roll across the Atlantic and brush a figure critical in the band's own development: Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde.
Raymonde notified Risk of his interest. Naturally, the label had little trouble persuading the band to collaborate with him. Within a few months, the band had decamped to London and begun work on In the Russet Gold of This Vain Hour, The Autumns' second LP. Things were looking good. Upon its release, the album hovered at the upper end of the college radio charts for weeks on end. LA's premier "alternative" rock station, KROQ, interviewed the band. The LA Times ran a cover story on them. Even MTV got into the act, turning up at LA's Troubadour to film an Autumns show. Then, without warning, Risk Records collapsed, and with it went Russet Gold.
Apparently unfazed by the setback, the band remained productive over the following years, releasing several EPs and scoring Academy Award nominee and Golden Globe winner Angela Shelton's movie, Searching for Angela Shelton. The film went on to garner wide praise, taking numerous festival prizes. Soon after this, the band hunkered down in engineer Jamie Seyberth's (Teenage Fanclub, Beachwood Sparks) studio and patiently sculpted an ambitious new full-length. In 2004, Bella Union released the self-titled album to considerable critical acclaim. The UK press found it particularly appetizing, as the quotes below testify...
"This is one glorious album from a band which can produce music that is unutterably beautiful but also hugely powerful." -- MOJO - 4 Stars **** "An A&R man's indie rock wet dream, replete with a lavish phalanx of guitars and singer Matt Kelly's acrobatic falsetto… Impressive stuff." -- Q - 4 Stars **** "Never soars at anything lower than 30,000 feet." -- NME - 8/10 "This album has such majestic chutzpah that the epic gene in you will simply surrender." -- The Times of London - 4 Stars ****
As the Angel Pool had earlier, the self-titled record generated interest in The Autumns from unexpected quarters. Punk rock visionary Rich Balling conscripted Kelly into the progressive rock ensemble The Sound of Animals Fighting, whose 2006 album, Lover, The Lord Has Left Us, charted at Billboard in the weeks following its release. Kelly went on to join Pyramids, a groundbreaking metalgaze band whose first album will be released in 2008. These projects, in turn, spurred new collaborations with artists as varied as Portugal the Man, Evol Intent, Jesu and UK DJ Michael Badal. Meanwhile, The Autumns performed a string of live shows with renowned painter Norton Wisdom (Wilco, Mike Watt, Beck) and made a fan of legendary finger-painter Aaron Kraten, whose urban-tinged productions proved a match with the band's new sonic terrain. Kraten composed the artwork for the forthcoming album.
Fake Noise is a departure from the languorous quality of the band's earlier material. It features a sharper, more immediate sound. The songs slice and dice with a frenzied precision, their pummeling pace interrupted only sparingly by the more serene fare of earlier albums.
While the Autumns' dreamier past is well-known -- they are featured, for example, in the forthcoming Eric Green documentary "Beautiful Noise" alongside My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins and the Cure -- those following their work closely have always winced at any over-simple labeling of the group. Fake Noise proves them right, as the songs burst into a variety of creative spaces and are held together only by that indefinable quality that is The Autumns.
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