Single Review: Automatic - New Beginning

 

Having recently toured the U.S with NNWNF favourites Parquet Courts, Retrofuturist motorik pop icons Automatic have returned with a new album ready to go. Excess is released on June 24th on Stones Throw Records and the trio of Izzy Glaudini (synth/vocals), Lola Dompé (drums/vocals) and Halle Saxon (bass), gave an indication of the sound of their new record with lead single 'New Beginning'. Never one to be fashionably late to the party, Ryan Doyle Elward took a listen and dissected the details.  

Automatic's 2019 release Signal was from start to finish fantastic. A combintaion of Gary Numan with Tubeway Army (Are 'Friends' Electric?) plus Warpaint (eponymous) as an Isaac Asimov Sci-fi film score. But the band's recent single 'New Beginning' seems to view any futuristic, vision as impossible unless humanity's current trajectory is checked.

Between the machine shrieks and the soft, crooning vocals, there's a kind of dialogue occurring. One about a way forward, where the fate of our organic planet wouldn't be sabotaged bt the inhabitants' satisfaction of their own myopic, immediate desires - so often served by the digitised, robotronic world - at the expense of everything else they've wanted or built. And Automatic says as much in their critique in the service of desire/ we will throw our lives away.

Even with deposits of hope like, there could be a new beginning/it could be a better place, followed by the resolution in the service of desire/we will travel far away, they're probably advocating with these ideas more so in an ironic way - since to be sure - it was by peoples' habitual, fickle thinking of this sort that brought the problem on in the first place.

Automatic's previous album establishes in aspects of sound a proper balance of the human and the mechanised, an object lesson that functions to illustrate their symbiotic relationship, which is at this point inextricable anyway.

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The band come to the UK briefly as part of their European tour, dates are as follows:

May 28th London Wide Awake Festival

May 29th Manchester Yes

May 31st Brighton Green Door Store

Follow Automatic on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter 

Buy directly from their Bandcamp, especially on Bandcamp Friday to help maximise the profits for the artist. 

Photo: Logan White