4 out of 5

Label: Smalltown Supersound

Produced by: Brian Reitzell

I love first albums that come years down the road in someone’s career.  Reitzell has been kicking around in the music industry since the 90s, when he was hanging with Redd Kross during the ‘Third Eye’ to ‘Show World’ releases.  He transitioned to soundtracks after that, working with Air and Kevin Shields on those Sophia Coppola film scores the kids liked, then racking up notability as a purveyor of quirk or creeps working on things like ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ or ’30 Days of Night.’  I first caught back up to him on the ‘Red Faction’ video game soundtrack, which leveraged Reitzell’s atmospherics into something equally ominous or driving.  Interestingly, he appears to have made – for now – the leap to TV, most notably on ‘Hannibal,’ his consistently unique clashes of discordant sounds adding a ton to that show’s offbeat vibe.

And now his ‘first’ album as a solo artist.  ‘Auto Music,’ according to the Allmusic review, was ‘inspired’ by drives to the studio.  With a nigh-hour runtime split across its nine tracks, that inspiration is notable: tracks ‘Auto Music 1’ and ‘Auto Music 2’ are toe-tapping pieces of open-ended bleep-bloop pop, and some tracks – ‘Ozu,’ ‘Oscar’ – aren’t afraid to let guitars and drums loudly beat it out, but the album absolutely has something of a mindless sensation to it, the trance one can get into on a long drive.  Our thoughts start vague and then take sudden shape, such as on the hazy guitar shimmers and distant drum loop that is the first half of ‘Last Summer’ (supposedly featuring Mr. Shields, again according to Allmusic) before it launches into a fast paced keyboard session with live-sounding drums pushed to the fore.  Sometimes the window is cracked and one just takes it all in – witness the wandering ‘Gaudi’ and ‘Honeycomb,’ where elements drift in and out, converging at moments, then forgetting to converge the next.  At the same time, Reitzell’s history with instrumentals keeps this from just floating into unemotive, disconnected background music: it doesn’t feel wishy-washy or improvised; each track absolutely captures a feeling, even if it’s a feeling one can’t quite put into words.

Interestingly, the vinyl version moves ‘Last Summer’ to starting Side B, whereas the CD version has this opening the album.  It is the only track on ‘Auto’ that has a significant stylistic split in the middle; perhaps it was felt that this ‘speeds up’ sitting through the album in one go, whereas the vinyl version Side A works effectively as a slow rampup (starting with the quiet ‘Ozu’ intro ‘Ozu Choral’) to the strong ‘Auto Music 1.’  It’s an interesting choice, and does, frankly, change the shape of the listen pretty notably.  ‘Auto Music’ may not hit as directly as some of Reitzell’s scores, but that would seem to be the point.  The artist took the opportunity to step back and smear the audio palette with some greys.  It’s meticulously composed, and an incredibly rich headphone listen.