I didn't hear AUBURN LULL's first two albums "Alone I Admire" or "Cast From The Platform".
But I have spent a long time with this newer work and I'm sorry to report that high levels of torpor have started to provoke anxiety bordering on twitchiness.
AUBURN LULL seem to be what remains of a once-thriving space-rock scene in the State of Michigan, USA, harking back to more visceral rock trippers like FLYING SAUCER ATTACK. (Or even HAWKWIND or SPACEMEN 3). There is precious little of that rougher, pioneering dna in this album. What I hear is a professionally made film score rather than a popular music album.
At heart it's sweet minimalist music, with no discernible incident before track 10 "Geneva" when opening moments of scarily purifying abrasiveness give me something to pay attention to. As a committed guitar fan, it's very disappointing to see Sean Heenan, Jason Kolb and Eli Wekenman all credited as guitarists when the natural qualities of the guitar - its attack and its complex textures are almost completely smoothed out into washes of sound that could have come from basic synth or midi pre-sets. Single string lines are little more than short repetitions of highly conventional arpeggios played for pureness of tone rather than for the intensity, the emotion or the consciousness-shifting or the drone.
All else is slow moving featureless chords and soft, womb-like pulses of resting tempo. Dynamics imitate gently rolling hills rather than peaks, gorges or surprise views. In the absence of musical incident my inner gaze flickers around to find something for the rest of me to do while the blandness hauls time into some kind of limbo. An untitled track 12 closes the album with ten minutes of imagined soundtrack from an idealistic science fiction movie about godlike creatures landing in Michigan and being welcomed by peace-loving citizens who make nice cakes and cover their tables with gingham cloth, billowing out in slow motion against flower meadows and smiling children.
I can see that this album will have been experienced by many as "beautiful" and "transcendent" and so on. It is not intended to be challenging or confrontational. Its essence is cosmic stillness and selflessness. But this does leave very little to write about and even less to enthuse about. I wonder if those who want aural balm might be better served in the classical section of their favoured retail outlet, picking up orchestral and choral work labelled as "meditative" or "pastoral". At least there you have the shimmer of choirs really singing and strings really being bowed by sublime musicians. Here it all sounds like the machine is asking you to switch off the lights and go to sleep. Perhaps on the Space Station of 2001 A Space Odyssey: there is a waltz on the album - (Grange Arcade) but "The Blue Danube" fits Kubrick's vision much better.
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Better still, you could go towards work like PHILIP GLASS's score for Koyaanisqatsi which sounds, in comparison, as if there was something spiritual in the universe to get overawed by.
As artists, AUBURN LULL have travelled to get to this music, in all honesty and with exploratory intent. But rather like the characters at the end of Planet of The Apes, they have arrived back at the remains of something that has already been done, and which (perhaps) was done better by predecessors. It does sound like an honest album, and one on which a lot of care was lavished. But as a free floating cultural item out here in the big wide world it is likely to find no more than a handful of devotees and recommending ot to people who are not already halfway to buying it might be a disservice to them.
www.darla.com
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