The AutumnsYou are a music geek. Don't try to deny it. If you weren't, you probably would not be reading this webzine.
You are a music geek and you are sitting in your cubicle, checking MySpace for the tenth time this hour as you try to find something to like about the only station that comes through on your radio. You hear a familiar voice and your ears perk.
Musician X could be male, female or Macintosh-generated superstar. It does not matter. Musician X is your favorite. You wring your hands and take a deep breath, anticipating Musician X to discuss the obscure foreign film that inspired the b-side for the first single or the show that was cancelled after fifteen minutes when a riot erupted. Instead, the insipid motormouth hosting the radio show asks, "So, how do you like the new album?"
Your co-workers stare uncomfortably as you yelp and pull strands of hair. As a music geek, you are offended. This is understandable. Just be thankful that you are not Musician X.
For the Autumns, enduring the banality of the commercial radio interview was just one of the annoyances that befell them while poised to inherit the not-so-elusive title of Next Big Thing in the late-1990s.
While touring for The Angel Pool, the band's 1997 debut full-length for barely-indie Risk Records (the first release was the EP Suicide at Strell Park), the musicians were brought into a major commercial alternative station in Salt Lake City. The interview was such a coup for the label that even the band's A&R rep flew to Utah for the event.
Singer/guitarist Matthew Kelly relates, "We went in to do the interview and the guy had clearly never heard the band." The DJ proceeded to grab a copy of the disc and pull out the liner notes. "I suspect that he pulled out the liner notes [thinking] there would be a lot of information there and he could just talk off the cuff with us. Of course, there is no information there. It says where it was recorded and nothing else. "So, we have this guy looking at the liner notes and saying stuff to us like 'How do you like the record?' and 'So, it was recorded in Huntington Beach?'"
This is the part where Salt Lake City music geeks start screaming at their radios, "No! Ask what effect pedals they use to make the guitars sound so dense! Ask why they cover 'Garlands' from the Cocteau Twins when they play live!"
In the studio, the silence hung heavier than the fog of fuzzy guitars that have endeared this band to Los Angeles. "We're normal people with no real desire to become famous. We're not motivated to have a stupid conversation. What do you mean how do we like the record? It's our record!"
The interview resulted in dead air and criticism from the label for not playing the publicity game. "If we had been in sync with the label and with the label's mission to presumably make us big rock stars, then presumably, when the interviewer says 'Huntington Beach,' we would start talking a lot...We couldn't do it. We had this problem all over the place."
Over the past fourteen years, there have been line up changes, label changes and periods of hibernation, but the band's two constants remain Matthew Kelly and guitarist Frankie Koroshec, who formed the Autumns as teenagers in Santa Clarita, a Southern California suburb about one hour north of Downtown Los Angeles. That was back in 1992 and, like many other Southern California teenagers during the pre-Nirvana portion of the last decade, the band's influence stemmed from Manchester, England.
"When we started," says Kelly, "really what we listened to were the Smiths and the Stone Roses, so we were, in terms of being a guitar band, just trying to do what Johnny Marr did and, of course, failed miserably. It's impossible to do what Johnny Marr did [but] that was our pop archetype."
Listening to the Autumns' latest, self-titled release, there is no trace of a maudlin croon fighting for spotlight against the jangle of a Rickenbacker. The roaring layers of sound may call to mind, at various points in time, the likes of Sonic Youth, Cocteau Twins, Catherine Wheel or Godspeed You Black Emperor, but there is no doubt that The Autumns have developed into an entity of its own. There is a sense of continuity between this album and previous work. Kelly's vocals remain an eerie shimmer across the thick aural expanse that is the result of three guitarists. However, The Autumns is an altogether more ambitious project than The Angel Pool or their unreleased sophomore effort, In the Russet Gold of This Vain Hour. There seems to be a sense of intricacy to the production that was missing from prior albums, werein each spin of The Autumns brings forth another layer of sound that was not heard on the previous listen-lullaby melodies stabbed with furious drum beats, empyreal vocals peering through brooding pianos, sonic nuances that hark back to 1950s pop songs. The Autumns is the culmination of twelve years marred with strife. It is an effort wrought with a ferocity that could only exist within an outfit that has spent the last several years fighting through obstacles.
As the 1990s drew to a close, the Autumns became something of a ubiquitous presence across Los Angeles. Near-weekly gigs consistently drew large crowds, even with very little in the way of promotion. They also became the only band to play regularly at the Thursday night indie/Britpop/mod club Cafe Bleu and the bi-weekly goth extravaganza Coven 13 (both clubs ended their runs in 2000).
"I don't know how it is now, but then there seemed to be a lot of scenes happening," says Kelly. "Cafe Bleu was a real scene. We were exposed to that and introduced to that. We played there pretty regularly and, to a lesser extent, Coven 13 and [now-defunct Long Beach-based goth club] Vampyricus. That helped because there was an audience that was already in place. We could play there and there would be 100 people that wouldn't have heard of us otherwise."
The Autumn's fanbase grew primarily through word of mouth. A young girl may have seen the band at Cafe Bleu, thought of her old Creation Records and would then bring five of her friends to the next gig. A goth boy obsessed with 4AD Records may have been struck by the Robin Guthrie-influenced guitarwork and would bring five of his friends to another gig. Tracks would end up on mixed tapes swapped between friends. Messages along the lines of "You have to check out this band that is playing at The Martini Lounge tonight" were left on answering machines. Shows were generally crowded, oftentimes uncomfortably so. There was a constant influx of people at the merch booth. It was an unintentional marketing technique that worked well for the band.
Enter Risk Records.
By 1996, the band had spent a few years playing together while attending college. After working on some demos, they self-released the EP Suicide at Strell Park. The EP received some attention on local radio and was subsequently picked up by Risk Records, a then-fledgling independent label with EMI distribution, who reissued the EP shortly before releasing The Angel Pool.
"At the most general level," Kelly opines," I think that Risk was the typical pseudo-indie [label]. Pseudo meaning that it was independent, but I think that their chief aim was to serve as a launching pad for artists that were unknown. They sort of functioned almost as a management company pretending to be a record label. The main aim was to get the band signed to big deals and then take whatever profit emerged from that. The only difference being that they actually printed and manufactured records and put bands on tour."
Herein lied the major point of conflict between the band and the label. Where the band wanted to make music simply for the sake of making music, the label was more interested in The Autumns as potential rock stars.
"In the case of Risk, what they wanted you to do was make you break," Kelly explains, disgust dripping from his voice as he drops the industry term for musicians achieving some sort of commercial success. "They wanted you to break in a big way. Breaking, at least from what I can see, always involves some kind of stupidity. There is no way you can break unless some huge, corporate entity is telling everybody--everybody meaning tons and tons of people--that there is a new cool thing that you should be into, telling you that you should be at this show because it's cool to be there, you should but this record because it is cool to buy it. That has to happen. The thing is, to grow at a normal rate, [the band has] to pretty much grow by word of mouth. You're always kind of dancing with the devil when you deal with people like this because there are certain textbook things that they want to do to make you break. They want to take certain pictures of you. They want you to interview in a certain way...This is what you get when a system like that is in place. You get a bunch of lame, trite bands bing huge for a year or two at a time and then being replaced by other lame, trite bands."
By the 1990s, the U.S. had overthrown the U.K.'s reign of the music charts. Hip Hop had replaced New Wave on the student party circuit while Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins had edged the Cure and the Smiths off of dorm walls. There were few exceptions to America's musical domination of the decade, one of which was Radiohead. In 1997, the year that saw the reissue of The Autumn's Suicide at Strell Park and the release of The Angel Pool, Radiohead released OK Computer to resounding commercial success. The Oxford-based band was soon transformed from just another marginally successful British band to a staple of seemingly every college kid's record collection. Logically, an American equivalent would have to emerge and the Autumns, with high-register vocals and a style that was both experimental and accessible, seemed to be a likely candidate. While Kelly acknowledges that he is not positive that there was a "coherent vision" that dictated the label's plans for the Autumns, he felt that by the time the band was ready to release it's second full-length in 2000, the goal was to market the Autumns as "an American Radiohead."
"They were actually trying to put stickers on the record that said 'If you like Radiohead,' which we had stopped them from doing.
"They had themselves convinced that [In the Russet Vain of This Gold Hour] was going to be American Radiohead. So, they did have a certain amount of success in creating some sort of hype around it. We never had dealt with more hype than right before that record came out. We were interviewed on KROQ. The people from MTV came out to film one of our shows. There was a big piece in the LA Times about it, which was kind of freaky."
The Autumn's second album made it to the pages of virtually every alternative music magazine. The Radiohead comparisons were constant, but always positive. Undoubtedly, this album was set to make a heavy impact. Yet, it was never released.
"The reason I got, "Kelly states, "was that the record label collapsed financially, which I think was true. They said that they were going out of business, which apparently isn't true. Apparently, Risk is still around in some form. I got an email from someone recently saying that Risk was trying to sign him." Whether or not Risk Records still exists is undetermined. A recent internet search provided no information in reference to the label, outside of press clippings from the Autumns previous records and other artists that were signed to it at that time. We were unable to locate any sort of contact information to confirm whether or not Risk is still in existence.
Kelly notes, though, that the band was not brokenhearted after receiving the news that the album would not be released. "We wanted the record to come out, but we also had our reservations about it because we didn't like it very much. The whole thing with the interview on KROQ, the LA Times article and whatnot sort of tripped us out. All of a sudden, there were people coming to the shows that we had never seen before. People we knew from ten years before were coming to the shows, maybe because they thought we were going to become famous, and that felt sort of gross. We had mixed feelings about that.
"We didn't like Risk, so the idea of somehow getting out of our contractual obligations was a relief. The real problem wasn't when the record didn't come out. The real problem was over the next few years when we couldn't get anyone to look at what we were doing."
After their ill-fated sophomore effort, the Autumns went on a brief hiatus. Kelly spent time in Texas with spacerock-influenced Lift to Experience (with whom The Autumns release a split 7" in 2000). The music made such an impact on Kelly that he returned to Los Angeles with a different outlook on his work.
" I realized that I had too many irons in the fire and probably needed to quit doing everything except music if I wanted to do something good. I sold my equipment. Frankie sold a lot of his equipment and we spent a lot of time trying to get a sound that we liked. Up until that point, we had been playing with the same equipment we had been playing since we were seventeen years old. We tried to step things up. I think we spent about eight months just rehearsing and not playing any shows and just disappearing and trying to have no fear about what that would do, in terms of whether or not people would come to see us, all under the premise that we needed to think of nothing but the new record and to try and to think several levels forward...We disappeared for about eight months and just worked on songs.
"When we reappeared, it was great. After a few shows, the crowd was really bit and people seemed really excited about the new material. The only problem at that point was trying to keep the flow of money to record, which took forever."
While the Autumns managed to release three EPs in the ensuing years, they lacked the backing of a label necessary to fund a proper third album. When the band began to play live again, they made an attempt to put together a full-length release.
"A guy with a label agreed to give us a certain amount of money to record an album," Kelly recalls. "We used up that money and didn't have an album. He wasn't willing to give us any more money because he didn't have any and our contract time ran out, so we got to keep the masters."
In addition, upon the release of the 1950s pop-inspired EP Le Carillon, Restless records approached the band to sign under the condition that a full-length album would follow in the theme of this EP. The band declined the offer, as it was a sound that was never intended to comprise an entire album.
"Because we were close to signing, that was pretty depressing," Kelly laments. "We were finally writing some really good things and suddenly there was nobody around. In terms of money, there was nobody around to help us."
The band spent the next four years playing live to help fund studio time. "At some point, we needed ten thousand more to mix. We started doing these shows where we charged fifty dollars for tickets and told people, 'if you want the record to come out, we have to do this.' We raised the rest of the money like that."
With a new record ready for release, the Autumns were able to sign with Pseudopod Records in the US and Bella Union (the label operated by former Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde, who produced In the Russet Gold...) in the UK.
If the Autumns had achieved rock star status, this might be the perfect fodder for a cable television band biography, conveniently edited for added sensationalism. But the truth is that the Autumns are just five guys who play music because the sound beckons them, not because of any drive to sell out arenas and spawn a few tribute albums. They are like legions of local bands playing in small clubs with atrocious sound and struggling to release music while remaining wary of the outside influences that may taint their vision. However, where many bands collapse under the system, the Autumns have thrived, with their self-titled third album serving as a testament that out of hardship, beauty is born.