Autumn

Sealed - Brand new vinyl.

Being in a shoegaze band in 2011 is roughly the equivalent of being in a rockabilly band in the 1980s. You either end up sounding like a musty museum piece, trotting out the same clichés to diminishing effect, or you can somehow transcend the inherent creepiness of slavishly keeping a long dormant style alive by adding something new to the routine or by writing amazing songs and playing the hell out of them. On their debut album, Autumn, New Zealand’s the Golden Awesome escape residing in the shoegaze trash heap by doing the latter with extreme levels of skill. The record is filled with songs that burrow into your brain easily, like termites into rotted wood but much more pleasantly than that imagery might suggest. Whether slow and dreamy (“Where to Begin,” “Highlife”), midtempo and dreamy (“Autumn”), or fast and dreamy (“Astronomy”), there is a whole lot of dreaminess on Autumn. The layers of overdriven (but not too processed-sounding) guitars add to the dreamlike state and the swooning female vocals give the songs an aching beauty and a gracefully mysterious undertone that, when combined with the welcome sense of urgency and drama the band plays with throughout, give the impression that the songs actually mean something to them; they aren’t just re-creating the sounds of their favorite albums for kicks. There is a level of emotion and power to Autumn that most shoegaze bands (past and present) totally bypass in favor of monkeying with pedals and trying to out-reverse-reverb each other. You could argue all day long over the merits of rehashing old musical ideas and reanimating the corpses of dead Valentines, but when a band does that with the ability, passion, and undeniable knack for crafting beautiful songs that the Golden Awesome do here, it kind of makes all the debate irrelevant.