BeatRoute Magazine B.C. print e-edition - May 2016

Julianna Barwick - Will Bleached - Welcome the Worms Tim Heidecker - In Glendale Tim Hecker - Love Streams
Autolux
Pussy’s Dead
30th Century Records
Released off Danger Mouse’s recently established
label, 30th Century Records, Autolux
has officially traded in the shoegaze
they were once known for and instead gets
busy with interstellar rock layered with
tic-toc tech beats. A major shift from their
2004 debut album, Future Perfect, Pussy’s
Dead leaves little room for familiarity.
If anything remains, lead singer Eugene
Goreshter still maintains a spiderweb-quality
of voice only Elliot Smith can master.
The first track, titled “Selectallcopy,” is
arguably the most amount of pop this
album can muster, with its steady repetitive
rhythm. True to Autolux fashion, the lyrics
are slightly spooky, and sound like they’re
coming from another room. Their second
track, “Soft Scene,” is crunchy, danceable,
and almost soundtrack-like. It’s clear at
this point that Autolux are confident in this
direction as the rest of the album swings
in and out with experimental sounds, an
aesthetic no doubt brought on by producer
BOOTS; a now well-known artist and producer
who worked with Beyoncé for her
self-titled album Beyoncé in 2013. Listeners
may feel they’re beginning to hear the same
song over and over, or that some of them
are just about to overstay their welcome,
but with a bit of commitment, there are
still a few surprises remaining. Final track
“Becker” captures a missing piece not yet
heard on this album; it’s both satisfying and
sweet, opening with the sound of an acoustic
guitar before tucking into a sleepy run
to the finish line. For those who remember
Autolux as the dreamy and soft band from
a more than a decade ago, it’s reassuring
to know that the album is still soft. For
fans, this could be a sign of things to come
for the three-piece from Los Angeles,
and for 30th Century Records as well.
• Leyland Bradley
Julianna Barwick
Will
Dead Oceans
You can feel yourself wading through
ominous oceans of sound as soon as
Will inhabits the intimate realms of your
consciousness. The nine-track adagio
swells with languid waves of looping
vocals alongside drifts of electric currents.
They lap over each other, yet they do not
overcome one another. Julianna Barwick
is minimal in her instrumentation, creating
a purposely simplistic tone. A tone that
makes you feel as if you are a slow-moving
wave in a body of water, eventually evaporating,
condensing, becoming a cloud, until
finally dripping down as rain beating on the
earth below. Pit pat, pitter pat. Creating a
consistent and unique melody, one that is
natural, the kind that you hope could last
forever. Like Barwick’s hands pitter-pattering
across piano keys or her bow slip-sliding
across cello strings. She embraces
rhythms that mirror natural acoustics.
The earth, an ocean, the atmosphere,
its rain. The sounds she creates are as
natural as her own introspection, exploring
her mind’s depths, refraining upon her
own emotions. And as she reflects, you
reflect. And as her emotions process, they
naturally lead to the soundscapes that
culminate in the ethereal world that is Will.
• Hannah Many Guns
Bleached
Welcome The Worms
Dead Oceans
Even though the record was released
on April 1st, this Californian trio’s new
record is no joke. The band’s second
record features an early 2000s alternative
rock and garage band sound that
is pretty rare in rock music these days.
This writer would call their sound, if
The Hives had a strong female vocal.
Since their 2013 release, Ride Your
Heart, the vocals have gotten stronger
and the beat more stable and consistent,
sounding like they have put thousands
of hours into improving their sound.
“Keep On Keepin’ On,” is a solid
start to the record, with its consistent
toe-tapping beat and simple sing
along lyrics that would get the listener
pumped for a night out in a heartbeat.
The fourth track, “Wednesday Night
Melody” takes a turn, beat wise, slowing
everything down slightly, but still keeping
the consistency of the rest of the record.
The fifth track, “Wasted on You”, features
a semi-fast beat including lyrics
that bluntly talk about wasting time on
a person they were once interested
in, saying in the chorus, “I can’t keep
wasting my emotions on you, getting
high on the drug that I call you.”
The entire 10-track record is a consistent
collection of head-banging fast paced
songs featuring fearlessly real lyrics
clearly influenced by the fast pace life of an
easy going Californian twenty-something.
• Andrea Hrynyk
Tim Hecker
Love Streams
Paper Bag Records
Space is definitely the place throughout
this otherworldly release by a seasoned
sonic manipulator who is no stranger
to pushing the boundaries of electronic
experimentation. Flute sounds are
meticulously sampled and placed in
robotic orchestration on “Obsidian Counterpoint”
making it come across like a
soundtrack for imploding stars. What
sounds like a xylophone is also heavily
processed with blasts of echoed reverb
leaving it almost unrecognizable.
The vast array of tones is quite overpowering
as tracks incorporate anything from
humans chanting to stuttering oboe loops.
Like much of Hecker’s work the samples
are never too smooth. Sounds glitch from
one another leaping in expressions of
surprise. Each track is like a stream of
sounds bleeding into one another over the
course of the album. Where this river of
sound is headed is up for you to decide
because the extreme abstraction suggests
this album is really all about the journey.
• Dan Potter
28 REVIEWS
May 2016