Auburn Lull – Hiber



Auburn Lull - Hiber
Revisiting my heroes from the past, I sat down and listened to Begin Civil Twilight. Immediately I remembered the pain of getting a copy of this album and the whole catalogue from Auburn Lull. Living in Germany I could not mail-order those records from Darla, the record label, because I didn´t have a credit card. So I took to Amazon and ordered… and waited. After about two months I could say it, “I own everything from Auburn Lull” and none of the CD cases were intact. Fuck you, postage system from six years earlier! 

Aside from this little anecdote, I remembered a quit and contemplative nature, which only this kinds of music could give me. I never thought about it as ambient or shoegaze, more like soundscape artists that happened to have singing included. If there is any time for their music it must be fall, swaying synths like fog rising or an early setting of the sun. Auburn Lull were pure distance for me, a taste of spiritual isolation from each and every thing whose value and meaning diminished from a critical point of view. I came to conclude “I hate my life” just as often as I said “I love this life”. Perfect balance. 



So filled with nostalgia I asked “What might they be doing today?”. One website visit later I had downloaded their Hiber EP they released in May of this year. Auburn Lull are finally back making music (I hope even more) and these 22 minutes play like new entry points to my old ways of thinking. Purely instrumental, I feel like the band has finally found their inner Eno in this EP. From ghostly “CA1”, lucid “Hiber” and murky “Static Partition”, they show that their musical idea of guitar driven soundscapes hasn´t aged in any way. In the last years I´ve come to miss gripping music in this lane and with their short EP Auburn Lull have only reinstated that feeling while giving a short glimpse of hope. So stay tuned, for I sense great things coming. And the next time, maybe with vocals again.

Download it for free here.

And damn those 100 people who got to buy the cassette!

7/10

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Top Albums 2022 Part I 50 – 41

Image
5 0. Vacant Gardens – Under The Bloom / Obscene Re-released in 2022 after flying under my radar in both 2020 and 2021, Vacant Garden’s provided two albums of delightful shoegaze / dream pop. The last time a band sounded this ethereal as the greats such as Cocteau Twins or Slowdive, must have been Asobi Seksu. Vacant Gardens pull together the sweet mixtures of fuzz, gloom, and vocal transcendence. There is rainy melancholy in the guitar hazes, counteracted by flourishes of powerful chords, arpeggios, and gentle strumming, all coming together in the float of Jem Fanvu’s ethereal vocals. Atmospheric density does not need to be inventive as such, it just needs to be well made and full of intricacy. Seldom do albums capture the yearnings of youth I encountered when first making contact with shoegaze. While nowadays most find the best conflation of dream pop and shoegaze in Beach House and their synthetic rhythms and uplifting haze, Vacant Gardens deliver a proof of concept in striking gre...
Read more

Top Tracks 2016 Part I 101 – 91

Image
This introduction starts with my yearly apology for not writing more on this piece of shit of a blog. Every part of life takes its pound of flesh and I spent a lot of time on useless projects, which could have been used to write a great many reviews for great albums and tracks that didn´t even get the attention or recognition on other outlets. Maybe someday, I´ll get around and do this full time. But I´ve beend writing a lot, will finish a degree soon and might get down to bringing out more content in 2017. For all things, check out my articles over here and my visit on a German student radio, talking about some of my favorite tracks and my own biography through music. Enjoy this list, I sure do.    101. Nagamatzu – Melancholy Oxide ( Above This Noise ) Nagamatzu was a duo shortly active in the  1980´s and this years Above This Noise compiled some of their scattered material on a great compilation. "Melancholy Oxide", much like the other songs, captures ...
Read more

Roy Wood$ – Exis

Image
Roy Wood$ – Exis As hype of The Weeknd´s newest effort is on its high point, I figured it would be nice to shed some light on the newest protégé of Drake, Roy Woods (stylized as Wood$). With good reason, because in Woods first effort Exis , you´ll find everything you might be missing on Beauty Behind The Madness , I definitely feel this way. There is this certain kind of murky blend of r´n´b that made The Weeknd translate into the experience or second-hand fiction of life as a lost twenty-something – between lust, frustration, loads of substances and a creative drive being fueled and destroyed by all those things. However, it would not bring Woods any justice to just put him into the line of Weeknd imitators. The similarities in sound are pretty much obvious. While there might not be a grand darkness and haze as on House of Balloons , Exis relies heavily on deep atmospheric beats and the ambiance the whole OVO imprint, fathered by Drake, are known for. But Woods doesn´...
Read more