I've always read anthologies, horror or sci-fi, and come October it's all horror. When every story has a different author the tone shifts every few pages, and a few will miss. Single author collections are the ones I like best. Stories run clear, and despite the occasional abstract one or something in between, they still read as one person, so nothing really misses. Automatic is my favorite author in that way. Dark, cosmic and groovable songwriting on repeat for a year.
Izzy leaning in over the keys, working the pedal on top.
I've shot Automatic three times and still can't get past Izzy Glaudini's voice, smoky and resonant. She sings level and detached, at a narrator's distance from the story. Her pitch moves around but the volume never does. On the low lines she comes close to speaking, the melody almost disappears, and that evenness turns the darker songs ominous. She can sing about the end of a world and nothing in her voice changes. The menace comes out of that gap. Then she goes up, her voice and the synths turning into one thing, angelic and ethereal, two words I use too much but can't beat. She comes back down to the part I wait for in Black Box:
Run baby run moving closer to the end Built to a height the only way is down Here comes the fall how does it feel
Their songs are set in the space age and take on war and consumerism, and the new LP Is It Now? is that kind of collection. Every track is stellar. Black Box, Mercury, mq9 and the title track are my four, and I'd call each one perfect.
This is the exact music I love. There's no guitar in this band, and that was the decision from the start. They build songs on the bass line, so Halle Saxon's fretless carries the melody a guitar would have. With no frets to stop the string she slides between notes, and I've never figured out how anyone finds them all. The drums on the record stay taut under it all, the same clipped pulse carried over from their first release, while the synths come in glassy and strange on top.
Halle's hands on the Moog, eyes down.
I've got a long list of DNFs when it comes to books. Is It Now? is a set of stories I'll read over and over.