Labels: 54 40 Or Fight! Records
Review by: Andy Malcolm
The other day I received about 908 records to review from this label! Yoink. So here begins my attempt to actually get them all reviewed, although a few of them will no doubt find their way into other peoples hands. Eyes of Autumn was the first one I plucked out of this pile of shiny plastic, and the fickle finger of fate has dealt me a kind hand, which:
a) impressed me, dealing a set of cards with a single finger is pretty darned cool
b) made me think fate should perhaps deal itself a hand, so it can have more than a single finger
c) meant I got to listen to a great cd
Eyes of Autumn are really, really good and I enjoyed this CD an awful lot. They seem to have nailed a rather glorious style of mathy indie rock, one that involves warm guitars and drums and lots of cymbals. Under-stated vocals that wander around in a boyish fashion, which is just what I like when bands play this style of music, I can’t abide the polished stuff. They also have rare moments where all the boys sing at once in a high pitched fashion and sort of loud. Cap’n Jazz represent! You’ve got to love it. It’s all too easy for me to prime the ‘Braid’ inkpad and stamp it all over this CD, but that would be unfair on EoA. They have many more subtle and quiet moments than Braid, where things just wind away into a virtual distant nothingness, although the complexities and neat little touches remain. They certainly have great control over building up the music and letting it slip slide back down again. You get moments like the wonderful “As A Child” that ambles along with twinkling guitars and unintrusive vocals, bringing in the rockier moments as and when. They even have one song where they spazz out and the dude has totally harsh screeched vocals. Screamo bastards in indie kids bodies. There are also moments that are seriously reminding me of the Van Pelt, circa ‘Sultans of Sentiment’ (WHICH IS A FUCKING GREAT THING!), starting with “Cordially Yours” with it’s familiar guitar sound and mellowed out, almost jazzy song structure – but the bit that really does it is that it has recordings in the background of just people chatting and stuff, the VP did that too. Anways, I love the particular guitar sound that is on that track, it’s hard to describe, but you’ll know it as soon as you hear it.
Overall, this is a fantastic album. It’s awesome to hear a band play such a cool style of music so well, and to make it sound fresh into the bargain, most new bands in the whole emo / indie domain gave up this sort of thing for a much more tedious path long ago. I want to tape it and play it my car but my tape player is broke. Or at least I have to use tweezers to get the bloody things out again. Hohum.