Autumn, Again is a merely good album that still manages to put me in greater awe of its creators, as it makes more apparent than ever the slippery and mercurial nature of A Sunny Day In Glasgow’s writing and recording process. This process—which will always be mysterious to me but which I imagine involves some kind of Factory-esque warehouse where sounds are thrown against a wall and bounce back as a widescreen tapestry with no empty or wasted spaces—resulted in a masterpiece last year, the overlooked Ashes Grammar, so the fact that it’s just as likely to result in an album cut from the same cloth (literally, if these new songs are in fact outtakes) but somewhat less coherent and engaging makes the earlier album’s triumph all the more… awesome. Since the band’s effect is cumulative, much of the problem can be explained by the new album’s mere 34-minute running time. It takes a long time to build up an hour’s worth of brilliant material, but the opposite impulse, to unload frequently, is in conflict with their strengths.
That means the problem here is more in the overall design than in the songs themselves, and there are a number of fine ones, most of which don’t stray far from the Ashes Grammar template. The band’s best songs (somehow “song” seems to feeble a word, but let’s count “5.15 Train” and “Shy” among their finest) work as elaborate series of effects, dreamy inversions and eruptions of the greatest hits of a half-century’s worth of rock ‘n’ roll and its subgenres, organized by a strong beat that’s often only felt as a ripple in the fabric of a worldly and/or otherworldly sound. That’s true of the new album’s proper opener, “Fall In Love,” though here the introductory “effect” is so cacophonous and gleeful that it sends you reeling, without bearings, for a good number of seconds. It’s a dizzily romantic feeling, and indeed these songs are advertised as “pop songs,” which I think is just a way of saying they are also love songs. The cutest of these, called “How does somebody say when they like you?” is not as delightfully twee as a similar moment on Ashes Grammar that asked the question, “Do you believe in dinosaurs at all?” nor is its R.E.M. jangle as pungent and darkly cast as its Ashes equivalent, but the track is a nice mixture of these two elements that were kept separate in the band’s earlier alchemic trials.
These are good songs, and before we punish Autumn, Again for being a stopgap collection of outtakes or a clearinghouse of this-side-of-great ideas, let’s take one more look. The album cover bears the inscription “Pop Songs – 2010,” and I think there’s an answer in this detail. In poetry, there’s something known as an occasional poem, and while I’d never conceived of the possibility before, I believe Autumn, Again qualifies as something so modest as an “occasional album.” Like all occasional art, it wants only to commemorate a moment in time (autumn 2010, in the present case), and it must do so with a certain amount of reverence, but not necessarily with a great degree of artfulness. (A Sunny Day In Glasgow are ever artful, but I don’t think their present goal requires them to be in top form.) That leaves only one more month, give or take, to appreciate Autumn, Again before it becomes as much a historical relic as Phillis Wheatley’s 1771 “On the Death of Rev. Mr. George Whitefield.” This autumn too will die, and while Ashes Grammar strikes me as one for the ages, strong enough to change along with us, Autumn, Again exists to remind us where we were before the season passed.
