Words by Jacob Barron

Last year was the first complete year of soundtracking and yea, our earth continued to spin, and we are hence blessed to find ourselves faced with yet another autumn. The same pile of leaves that you raked up last year will soon form in your backyards and the same bittersweet feeling you had last year will seep into your listening, or at least it should. That feeling of happy sadness goes along with autumn as it does with indie rock, since that sort of ambiguity is what fuels a great deal of the genre, and there exist a million good entries that deliver that kind of wistfulness, and thus work as both indie rock and autumn albums (or “autumnbums,” which I’m still trying to shoehorn into everyone’s day-to-day vocabulary).

The hardest part, honestly, is figuring out what to call this, the second iteration of Soundtracking: Your Autumn. Hollywood rule #1 dictates that sequels should always be branded under the mantle of the previous version, to rope in fans of the first one. Ergo, as we round the corner into another autumn, it’s time for SOUNDTRACKING YOUR AUTUMN 2: SON OF SOUNDTRACKING YOUR AUTUMN, in which the first Soundtracking is kidnapped, and it’s up to his only son to save him! Then, after realizing that that doesn’t make any sense, everybody just agrees to hang out and listen to some really good tunes, like the following:

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The Avett Brothers / Emotionalism

The Avett Brothers / Go To Sleep

Before writing this, I looked back at that first version of Soundtracking Your Autumn, and classified each of the entries according to some adjective that could describe both the album, and the season to which I was attaching them. Emotionalism is the “rustic” pick, occupying the same space that The Decemberists occupied on the first edition. The Avetts make quintessentially modern tunes with tools that were available 100 years ago, creating a cross between bluegrass and punk that’s not nearly as annoying as that sounds like it would be. And it all comes off easy enough to make the whole album feel like it’s Seth and Scott Avett and a couple of friends, sitting on the porch, getting pleasantly wrecked on mulled wine and playing over the sound of rustling leaves on a Sunday afternoon.

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Menomena / Mines

Menomena / Intil

One of the first things I ever wrote for DUL was a song diary on Menomena’s “Tithe,” the mid-album standout from Mines, and while that song specifically makes me think of the fall, the whole album fits the same season. Menomena’s my favorite band that’s ever come out of Portland, and they take a measured approach to indie rock that still manages to actually rock hard, and they do so here for sure. On Mines though, they sound especially cavernous and kind of distant. It’s moody, but mature, indie rock that’s suited to autumn for what sounds like apprehension or ambivalence. It’s a transitional album I’d say, and feels like a band that’s very certain of itself making music about what it feels like to be uncertain. A lot of the catharsis of their prior albums is missing here (although “Bote” is pretty explosive), and rather than making everything boring, that absence just makes the album’s ample supply of prettiness feel earned, culminating in “Intil” which is the loveliest thing the band’s ever done.

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Kurt Vile / Smoke Ring for My Halo

Kurt Vile / On Tour

This is a pop rock record made with an ambient fan’s sensibility. I mean, seriously, take whatever sullen 90s pop rock band you can think of (wasn’t one called Tonic? I feel like one was called Tonic) and show them this and I’m sure they’d crib more than a few of Vile’s melodies, if not his lyrics. Then they’d clean up the guitars, maybe throw a bridge in there, and then use the song to soundtrack a movie starring Meg Ryan. Anyway, even when Vile’s guitar is plucked and percussive, the strumming and vocals are all swathed in reverb and loosely held together enough to make sure that nothing ever feels too rigid. Tunes like “Jesus Fever” and “On Tour” are solid, heartfelt rock songs that would be radio friendly if they weren’t so gauzy. What gets me about it is that it all somehow manages to sound both disaffected and soulful, and I know that those two terms are pretty much antonyms, but both qualities are present here. Vile’s laconic, almost lazy delivery of his lyrics undercuts the lush arrangements and elegant, roots rock guitar work, but it all fits together to create a reluctant masterpiece. It makes me picture a foggy landscape, an area where the warm air meets the cold, and then crystallizes.

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Julianna Barwick / The Magic Place

Julianna Barwick / Cloak

I referred to Joanna Newsom in last year’s version of this article as “a delightful little pixie” and “a benign sprite.” Also, did you know she’s dating Andy Samberg? They would have weirdly cute children. Anyway, I stand by those assertions about Joanna, and I’d go ahead and throw Julianna in that category too, and not just because their names start with the same letter and end with the same four letters. The Magic Place very much sounds like an album of the forest, or of the earth, like it’s actually the trees themselves gently breathing out these voices, which layer on top of one another until it sounds like the whole world is singing to you. Barwick is the conductor, the one standing on a stump and coaxing these sounds out of the woods. Everything here is very classical and almost entirely done with vocals (save for some piano on “Cloak,” which is the album’s best song) and it makes for a very religious experience, like a reverent but celebratory funeral for all the leaves upon which we’ll soon be walking. Moving and hypnotic.

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Deerhunter / Halcyon Digest

Deerhunter / Helicopter

Confession: I never cared for Deerhunter until this album. I respected everything they did, but that didn’t exactly make me want to listen to it. And then this album came out (with very little notice, I feel like, or maybe I just ignored it) and, slave to trends that I am, I got it, and was surprised to find that it’s just perfect in so many ways. There are stand outs (“Helicopter” is marvelously catchy and almost oppressively soulful and “He Would Have Laughed” seems to gleefully exhaust every different tempo, mood and sound in its attempt to pay proper tribute to the late Jay Reatard) but every song is just charmingly bittersweet, which is appropriate I think. According to co-lead singer Bradford Cox, the album is about how “we write and rewrite and edit our memories to be a digest version of what we want,” and in a simplified way, that makes me think of how we all hate the cold when it’s cold out, and think back to how good it was during the summer. Then in the summer, we think back on how good it was to feel cold. Summer is now over, and we’ll all look back on this one more fondly than we probably should, and as good as those memories will be, thinking of them will make your heart ache a little, because they’re gone. Halcyon Digest is the soundtrack to your best memories, whether honest or embellished, and a record that makes the end of summer, whether that’s a welcome or an unwelcome thing for you, universally okay, which is what all fall music should do.

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How did we do this year? Have your opinions changed since last autumn? What albums are you listening to on the back porch or around the fire pit, wearing hoodies and sipping on pumpkin-flavored beers? Leave us some comments and tell us all about it.

Filed under: Lists