Automatic

Lost Angeleans Automatic (Izzy Glaudini - synths, Lola Dompé -drums and Halle Saxon - bass), formed after a shared epiphany of despair at their environment led them to declare that most music is ‘“pumped out like plastic bottles into the ocean”. In a post-culture where throwaway tunes salve stow-away minds this is a taunting gauntlet thrown in the face of mediocrity (with alacrity).

Allied to the growing existential turmoil that screen-mediated relations are having on peoples’ sense of self and worth, this is another diatribe on the dire tribes of the cocooned cyber world(s) from the malevolent ‘machinery of modern life’ (‘Signal’) to the River Nihilistic misadventures of the alienated and untethered (‘Champagne’s ‘‘Oh no, we’re going nowhere’ Armageddon daze).

For a band (d)evolved from Bauhaus’s doomantic declamations (Dompé is the daughter of the Northampton band’s Kevin Haskins) the mood is sleek and bleak, a baroque and roll album of no flim-flab, lean and mean.

‘Highway’ builds and wields its roots/routes, a snaking, hypno-duction entices and entrances, the path to out there as uncertain as back there. Drive with diligence.

The Gary Numanish (in title and sounds) ‘Humanoid’ expresses the alienating processes of perma-tech-subservience, a resulting rewiring of anatomy and short-circuiting of cerebralism. Result: blank-eyed deadheads devoid of determinism.

The industrious think and you’ll miss it ‘I love you, fine’ features an all important comma which signifies something, everything, nothing. Anything. Its usage says more about the emotions inherent with(in), the message latent with mystique and mischief. A kiss-off brush off wrapped in those three words of (re)assurance and insurance. ‘Nature is a language, can’t you read?’ as a once sought after wordsmith once opined.

‘Signal’ deconstructs the modern malaise: am I a cog in someone else’s wheels-machine of illusion and delusion or an autonomous independent thinking organism with the capacity to resist and desist?

The brooding, terminal ‘Suicide in Texas’ pays homage to NY avant noise terrorists Suicide (the late Alan Vega and Martin Rev): a menacing and ethereal emanation from the (a)Lone Star state.

A startling debut.