Automatic by Sela Shiloni
Mages and saints astounding the masses with displays of alchemy and sorcery. Snake oil sellers offering medicinal wonders to tantalize paying crowds. What was once considered magic is often the fiction before the science becomes fact. Today, of course, we know too much — or think we do — to buy what’s happening right in front of us: It’s sleight of hand, parlor trickery. Yet once we’ve debunked the act, it still feels like being cheated out of cash. Because the world can grow a little darker without that magic.
Crazy ideas becoming less mystical on contact with what we call progress is a theme for Australian trio Automatic on their latest album, 2022’s Excess. Wielding a retrofuturist sound, Automatic eye one decade of culture — the 1970s — encountering another — the 1980s — and the upshot of that collision. “That fleeting moment,” in the band’s own words, “when what was once cool quickly turned and became mainstream, all for the sake of consumerism.”
It’s also an intriguing look at how artistic passion can feed a popularity that puts that first, animating passion at risk. Band members Izzy Glaudini (synths, vocals), Lola Dompé (drums, vocals) and Halle Saxon Gaines (bass) have talked about trying to manage those long-standing tensions, alongside the particular Gen-Z challenges of inheriting a world seemingly gone mad.
In their their music and elsewhere, Automatic are grappling with the perception that stalks women in the music industry of “female” as a category and an exploitable brand, all while they’re fighting for their growth as uncompromising artists. They name-check righteous influences such as CRASS and hi-NRG composer Patrick Cowley while making music that would make Kraftwerk and the Tom-Tom Club proud. Their credo is solidarity in the face of impossible odds.
All these ideas are wrapped in a framework of science fiction that might soon become fact once we’ve scorched the Earth beyond human livability. Automatic are your soundtrack for cackling at the cracking of society as capitalism crumbles before an unknown future and today’s magic becomes tomorrow’s monotone.
Automatic and the Marías play 8pm Saturday and Sunday, July 27 and 28, at the Fillmore Miami Beach at Jackie Gleason Theater. automatic.band ~ Tim Moffatt
