Autoflag & Adventsong - Crash Brackets

Released: April 12

This newest album by Autoflag & Adventsong is a bit of a lo-fi funhouse to me. The weird and awkward melodies with the madcap percussion and occasional vocal sample keep things interesting and rather upbeat most of the time. It's hard to parse out everything that is going on in this album, specifically because its quite a lot.  The very first song on the album, "Cerulean Blue is a Gentle Breeze," starts things off a little deceptively with a slow moving sample that contains musical tines and some more ambient noise. But then there's a vocal sample saying "get this show on the road" and then things get weirder and wilder as a heavily distorted lo-fi bass riffs comes in and is soon joined by a beat that feels faintly drum and bass inspired but hard to put your finger on. All the fun and fuzzy sounds come together atop this surprisingly dry kit, which honestly counterbalances the lo-fi grit of everything else quite well. 

The whole album is filled with stuff like this and the whole experience is just, well, fun (for lack of a better word). Many of the songs take inspiration from pretty standard techno, some drum and bass, and maybe even a little breakbeat. But nothing about the album conveys that it can fit neatly in any of these genres and definitely does it's best to avoid simple categorization.

 There's two songs in particular that I felt really sold me on this album's joyous madness, "Triple A Battery" and "Machete Order." The latter was definitely the crazier of the two to me, as the overly crunchy drums take center stage and we get these really cool rapid fire drum hits that pan from side to side, even as the track morphs around quickly and refuses to stay steady. The former though, it's a much more put together and I can definitely hear some of the breakbeat influence in that 808-ish drumkit. But it's right at the end of the track that I really loved, the part where the whole track starts to wind down and degrade as if the batteries started to die earlier but the lack of power just caught up to the track. It's fun and mind-melting moment among many other's disbursed throughout this short album.