The Autumn-Waking
The Loudest Birthday Ever EP
Tense Forms
File Under: Aggressive shoegazer rock
RIYL: Milemarker, PJ Harvey
It seems that there’s been quite the collection of two-piece bands around the music circuit lately, covering everything from punk and blues to fractured dance music. However, The Autumn-Waking’s The Loudest Birthday Everadds a new twist to the two-piece band dynamic by giving the good old-fashioned garage-rock sound a shoegazer bent. Now in all honesty, The Autumn-Waking does cheat a bit, as this EP sees guest vocalist/organist S. Renee Bertsch joining drummer Allison Stanley and vocalist/guitarist Joshua Dumas for five tracks that turn out surprisingly lush, considering the somewhat sparse musical arrangements involved (Bertsch, it seems, was merely a part of the recording process, and is not actually a regular member of the band).
The main basis of every song here is easily the drumming, which breaks out of the typical ‘minimalist drumming in a two-piece band’ mold, courtesy of Stanley’s inspired playing (which is obviously influenced at least slightly by her past experience with the experimental/free-form jazz project the SILVER measure). Bertsch’s contributions to this EP are major, as her strong vocals are present in every track, and even the minimal, underlying organ pieces in these tracks add immesurable depth to the songs. Still, though, there’s no seling Dumas short, either, as the guitar playing on The Loudest Birthday Ever is simple but intense, easily bounding from delicate and lulling to powerful and crunching, while his vocals drag along from near whispers to Bob Mould reminiscient guttoral moans.
The disc opens with the organ/guitar-fronted, stomp-then-sprawl experience that is “To the Wall and Over,” which is punctuated by some depely spacy guitars. Bertsch’s vocals on this track are to die for - especially when they’re intermingled with Dumas’ primative groans. “Copyright” opens with an awesome combination of organ and female vocals that sounds like a dark, twisted form of church music. Delicate guitars and quite drums build up behind the open until the levee breaks, leaving a trail of crunching guitars and aggressive male/female vocals in its wake.
“Under the Maude Moon” showcases the band’s diversity and musicianship a bit more, as another very nice, soft opening leads to a crazy jazz breakdown that clears out to a stark set-up of echoing guitar to back some incredibly vulnerable-sounding Bertsch vocals. An almost flowery-sounding musical bed backs up a mid-track spoken word soundbyte piece here, though the track does eventually build itself back up to a strong garage-rock pinnacle, complete with just a touch of the shoegazer vibe thrown in. The song’s closing comes when Dumas and Bertsch share a pretty little male/female vocal round that gets a slight bit aggressive. Somewhere around the middle of “Simulating the Haystack,” there’s a sweet instrumental break that builds up into a set of powerful, stop-and-go, quiet to loud rhythmic swells that grind together into a frenzied ending.
“What People Worry About” is The Loudest Birthday Ever‘s epic track, with the first few moments seemingly revolving around the vocal interplay between Bertsch and Dumas. The vocals compliment each other remarkably, as Dumas tends to moan quietly when Bertsch sings strongly, though as soon as his voice turns to yelling and groaning, she pulls her vocals back to a controlled whisper - the effect is has over the song is really something to be heard. The track’s breakdown is possibly the nicest on the disc, and after it breaks into another jazzy freak-out, a picked guitarline floats out behind another set of soundbytes. By the time the track returns to the original ‘chorus’ set-up, the form has been mangled, and what comes out is a thick noise redux.
Considering the simplistic nature of The Autumn-Waking’s musical set-up and compositions, there really is a lot going on during The Loudest Birthday Ever. Stark without being annoyingly sparse, The Autumn-Waking have devised another way to inject originality into the two-piece band dynamic. Recommended.