BrightestYoungThings: LiveDC: Autolux @ The Black Cat

all photos: Nadja Popovich
all words: Phil Cohen

For the past six years or so, I’ve frequented the message board on the band Creeper Lagoon’s website. For a group that had their heyday with a 1998 release produced by the Dust Brothers, the forum is unsurprisingly populated by people far older than I am. However lame this may sound, it worked out magnificently in 2004, when upon the suggestion of “Charlotte,” a fan of all things 90's rock, I checked out Autolux, a then-newly-formed band featuring Failure’s Greg Daniels on guitar, Ednaswap's Carla Azar on drums and Eugene Goreshter on bass and vocals. I had no idea what any of the music made by the band members in the past sounded like, only that I was supposedly guaranteed to love their debut album, Future Perfect. And then I saw their album cover. And I knew I would.

I realize that's a pretty silly thing to say but if you've ever imagined a perfect marriage between sound and aesthetic, the black and white balloons (?) and Addams Family font that the record's title is written in are pretty much it and sum up exactly what you can expect: dark, dense, urban, cold, a little bit sexy, a little bit scary and a lot bit noisy. Autolux made plenty of fans after Future Perfect, then did the disappearing-for-like-four-years thing, then started making waves again last year, when it was announced that their sophomore album Transit Transit would be released... eventually. Still no album but, hey, maybe they've got better things to do.

Luckily for me, they did decide to show up last night to the Black Cat. Opening was Mini Mansions, who I missed (but who must be great since no one with access to a microphone would shut up about how great they were), and Sleepy Sun, a Bay Area band that apparently features Russell Hammond from Almost Famous as its frontman. I'm sure there are people out there who think the whole Deep Purple meets Comets on Fire thing totally ROCKS and maybe sometimes it does, but when you have a dozen songs that just sort of sit there with few discernible hooks or even differences between each other, it's not particularly enthralling after the third time the band cuts out and the singer takes ten minutes to sing a syllable. You know what I'm talking about. Freals, they weren't bad or anything, I just went to go sit on the mushy couches Black Cat's got in the back after about fifteen minutes. One can only take so many Eastern-inspired flangy guitar solos, I always say.

Then Autolux came on! I cheated and read a few live reviews of them before showing up to see whether I should temper my expectations, and there was a pretty clear trend of mentioning that the band often starts off a little slow, a little distant and a little unengaging. Then, the reviews generally launch into some hyperbolic paragraph that ends with the words "brains" and "ceiling" in some novel permutation. Well, you know that scene in Magnolia where Phillip Seymour Hoffman is telling Tom Cruise how he thinks they have those scenes in movies because they actually happen?I think they wrote that stuff because it's true. Carla's steely, unfuckwithable demeanor was apparently due to the band's hotel losing (?) her car ("the whole thing?!") and her non-reaction to a few catcalls clued the audience into what was probably years of drunk men wanting to make romance with her. But they inevitably loosened up a bit, playing the shit out of Future Perfect tracks like "Sub-Zero Fun," "Blanket" and "Robots In The Garden." The new songs performed seemed less experimental, more focused on Eugene's hushed vocals (and, in one case, Carla and a drum machine and not much else) but maintained the band's signature driving, shoegaze sound with those unlikely pop elements they love sticking in there.

So, for an album I've literally never stopped listening to since I got it, it wasn't The Beatles and Radiohead jamming on Mt. Olympus while it's on fire or anything, but that also might be due to the fact that they haven't kept what could be called a regular performing schedule in literally years. I asked their merch guy when Transit Transit is coming out, to which he replied "early next year." Ugh. This band still means a lot to me but I sincerely hope everyone else stills gives a shit six (!) years later.

Brightest Young Things

Live DC

LiveDC: Autolux @ The Black Cat

FRIDAY 6/8

An Evening with YANNI Under the Stars @ The Filene Center

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