Trends come and go, it has always been that way, but music built more around emotion and feeling, timeless grace and fundamental truths transcends fad and fashion. It connects with us at a less transient, more deep rooted level, speaks to our primal urges, feeds something that goes beyond merely our needs to listen to music or contemplate art and seems to resonate with an older, wiser truth. The Pull of Autumn is just such music.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the people behind the album have always worked in the more left-field and alternative fringes of music in bands such as Fashion, Johanna’s House of Glamour and includes Belly co-founder and early Throwing Muse Fred Abong. The bulk of the songs grew from the collaboration between Daniel Darrow from Johanna’s House of Glamour and Luke ‘Skyscraper’ James, frontman of Fashion, but soon grew into a collaborative affair and it is this wide range of input and influences which gives The Pull of Autumn’s music such a fascination and musically wide ranging sound.
You could take Post-Rock as a starting point, though that is such a broad term it hardly pins down the sound, but from there the album wanders between ambient soundtracks, swirling and chilled alt-rock, mercurial psychedelic-folk mixes and much more besides. They Came Down is reminiscent of a Brendan Perry Dead Can Dance composition and Breathe feels more like a collection of textures and echoes which takes the post-rock moniker and its allusions to unstructured forms to its logical (or possibly illogical) conclusion. Laurasong wanders strange folktronica pathways, haunting, staccato, mercurial and angular and Heaven Now is a lush and hypnotic acoustic track drenched in glorious banks of washed out sounds and drifting, subtle white noise.
The fact that it is impossible to find a suitable label for it, even though ironically it is what I have tried to do though-out this writing, makes me love it. The fact that it shifts and shimmers through any number of genres, never sitting comfortably in one or the other and crying out for new generic descriptions along the way, makes me adore this record. I guess when you realise that genres only exist as a map for those who wish to stick to the well travelled sonic roads, it becomes easy to head out into the musical wilderness and see where the journey may take you. It is better to travel well that to arrive, as they say, and this album, and indeed this band, is not about merely travelling, this is exploration down the unbeaten paths of the glorious unknown.
