ALBUM RECOMMENDATIONS |

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The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Autolux

[#] Transit Transit (2010)

Reviewed July 29, 2023

The alien overcomes the machine, and it works out beautifully.

I spent the entirety of the Future Perfect review praising how noisy and nutso it all sounded, and then they went and tossed all that out for the sequel. (I full well knew this, having heard the latter before the former.) In place of clunky drums, there's shuffly clicks. In place of gnarled guitars, there's hypoxic strumming. Songs exist in an inky void, not an industrial space filled with sharp tools. The subtle approach had put a couple of Autolux fans to sleep no doubt, but where Transit Transit works is it hones in on its predecessor's hypnotic element. Songs like "Subzero Fun" and "Capital Kind of Strain" were powered by repetitive, alienated riffage, songs that ride one chord for the majority of their runtime, and Transit Transit is nothing if not very pleasingly hypnotic.

That's not to say there aren't some rockers ("Census" is great and "Supertoys" is Supercool), but Autolux is more concerned with warping sounds than fuzzing them this time out. Pianos are a much bigger component of the mix; like Future Perfect, Greg gets his lead vocal moment halfway through on the downright distressed piano ballad "Spots", and piano chords chime through the Carla-led closer "The Science of Imaginary Solutions". It's really when you let Autolux get into your head, like during "The Bouncing Wall"'s mental break ("I feel nothing, you are not here/I am free, the wall is bouncing") or on the creeping, whispering "Highchair" ("In your highchair spitting up/Let the sunlight strangle you"), that they prove Transit Transit a highly worthy, if not as immediately exciting, follow-up.

Essential:	Quintessential:	Non-Essential:	Rating:
"Highchair", "Supertoys", "The Bouncing Wall"	"Audience No. 2"	"Transit Transit"

NOFI | LOFI