Autolux

Listening to an Autolux album has always been like being temporarily transported to an entirely different universe, one where disorientation and intrigue are the dominant forces, and embracing the unfamiliar and mysterious is the best navigational strategy. Pussy's Dead, the Los Angeles-based trio's third album, is even more of an immersive sonic experience. The foundation of nearly every song consists of tangled sonic collages built around uneasy, often beautiful arrangements that approach meaning from seemingly impossible vantage points, but still register squarely with the listener’s emotions.  There is an “electronicness” within the organic wash of these songs, but it comes from digitally deconstructing what’s been played by humans, rather than precisely programming synthetic sounds and instructing a computer to play them.

The psychedelic-tinged "Change My Head" features alien-like, slo-mo synthesizers; first single "Soft Scene" boasts shapeshifting keyboard effects with percolating metallic-sounding beats that were all recorded acoustically and played live. Most of the drum track was created by playing on objects other than drums; and on "Brainwasher," blocky, cascading electronic noises scuffle with Eugene Goreshter's thrumming bass, as Carla Azar's bewitching lead vocals and relentless drum beat add additional contrast.   On "Selectallcopy" and "Hamster Suite," guitarist/keyboardist Greg Edwards' keening vocal melodies and phrasing are akin to a transparent slide: They're both of and apart from the vibrant, simmering sounds below. "When I think about this record, atmospherically, it’s the most satisfying record we've done," Edwards says. "And sonically, it’s also the strangest and densest."

To enhance this feeling, Autolux also made a deliberate choice to de-emphasize electric-guitar-driven music. They deconstructed and distorted what electric guitars they did use. (Only the noisy, messy "Listen To The Order" features familiar, barbed-wire-jagged shocks of the instrument.) This was a marked change from their previous two albums: 2004's stormy, post-punk-inspired Future Perfect—which landed them support slots for Nine Inch Nails, White Stripes and Queens Of The Stone Age—and 2010's eerie, synthesizer-and-sample-heavy Transit Transit.   "The emotional intent—or the emotional mood, the message of the songs—was always the most important thing to us," Edwards says. "And, at least this time around, electric guitar seemed to get in the way of that. It was harder to add things that sounded obviously like electric guitar, or use electric guitar like we have on the past two albums. And when we took it away, then all the room opened up for the atmosphere, the mood, the lyrics and the vocals to have the right impact."  

Still, although Pussy's Dead ended up sounding complex, many of its songs were initially based around simple acoustic guitar and vocals. Creatively, these sparse, sketch-like origins encouraged reinvention, Edwards notes: "Because the songs were so raw in their initial form, that left all this room to add layers and modulate things and turn things on their heads." For these transformations, credit goes to Pussy's Dead's producer, Boots, who's known for his collaborations with Run The Jewels and Beyoncé, as well as his own rhythmically inventive solo work.   "We've always wanted to work with a producer that had a wide stylistic range, but we just hadn’t met the right person," Azar says. "He just landed on us. Basically, came out of nowhere."

After coming aboard, Boots immediately clicked with everyone in Autolux—so much so that during the studio process, he operated like a fourth member of the band. "In the process of creating or making something, people talk about fortuitous circumstances and the right person coming in at the right time," Edwards says. "In this case, that’s really how it felt with Boots. He’s truly an Autolux fan; he’s sort of an Autolux expert. It was almost like he knew what we were as much or more than we did. He knew what the record should be, because he knew the prior two records so well. And from that, he understood where we wanted to go.”

The band had already recorded the basics of new songs with engineer Kennie Takahashi (who mixed Transit Transit) in various studios around Los Angeles. Boots proceeded to reimagine this existing music—sometimes dismantling the core ideas and building up a whole new song, and in other cases adding layers of sounds to a tune's foundation—while maintaining the integrity of Autolux's initial ideas and overall vision.

Most notably, "Junk For Code" evolved from an acoustic-based song with straightforward rhythms and a kite-twisting-in-the-wind vocal melody into something far more unsettled. The song's underbelly boasts thick layers of roiling effects—conjuring everything from a malfunctioning television and a robot short-circuiting to marbles spilling onto a floor—which collide with Azar's "futuristic, funky drum beat," as Edwards terms it. "The whole underpinning of the song completely changed, and changed the role of what the vocal melody was doing." "Anonymous," meanwhile, started off as a simple, piano-and-vocal demo—which Edwards had played and sung into the tiny microphone on his laptop “…about 15 minutes after I had written the idea"—but was augmented by Boots' placement of the drums and bass from another song, slowed to half speed and serving as a woozy, trance-inducing foundation.  

"He’s just the producer that we’ve always been imagining and hoping for, because he completely protects the song, but he also just goes into outer space with exploring what it can be turned into," Edwards says. Adds Azar: "We have loads of ideas, so it was nice to have someone with incredible taste come in and immediately take the best of the best and put everything in the right places so it all made sense––while at the same time flipping it all upside-down. I also think Boots coming from a hip-hop background was essential, always keeping that extra bit of attention on beats and rhythms." But for all of this desire to pursue the extraordinary, the members of Autolux were traditionalists when it came to assembling Pussy's Dead, whose title is a reference to a phrase in Charles Dickens' final, unfinished novel, The Mystery Of Edwin Drood. Sequencing was a priority and the artwork was carefully selected to reflect the music's aesthetic and intent.  

In fact, the record's cover comes courtesy of the Australian contemporary artist Anthony Lister, whose work is a striking combination of technical prowess, spontaneous technique and tradition-flouting. "Anthony does things very quickly and he doesn’t really second-guess himself— He does quite a lot of street art, so he’s not afraid to work on a painting, or a painting on the side of a building until he loves it - knowing that it will most likely be destroyed," Azar says. "He combines both beauty and darkness in his work at the same time, which is very Autolux."  

Perhaps more important, the band views Pussy's Dead as a collection whose songs not only stand on their own as individual works of art, but also draw considerable power when listened to in context with each other. “We view the activity of listening to a record more like watching a movie than just consuming individual songs.” Goreshter says.  “All of these songs exist in a meaningful relation to the songs surrounding them.  That’s the way we make records and that’s the way we intend people to experience them.”  

Autolux's music has always been an adventurous balance of sonic pleasure and emotional gravitas. But Pussy's Dead is particularly transformative: Its intelligent construction and experimental approach make for an album that's not tied down to any era, genre or approach.   "Maybe we’re just old-fashioned in that way, but we do romanticize the idea of a classic album that people 10-20 years from now can put on and listen to the A side and B side, and completely lose their sense of space and time,” Goreshter says. "That’s important to us. We always talk about a kid in a basement somewhere in the Midwest getting—"   Interjects Azar, "stoned with headphones on." "Yeah, that notion has always appealed to us," Eugene says. “That this album is transporting a kid somewhere else, outside of his little suburb. We want to move people—that means something to us."