I’ve been here for three years now, so I have seven more years until I can pretend convincingly that I’m from Portland, and the City Council retcons me into the list of 2004 high school graduates, and I get a diploma that proves I am “from here”. I’m told the Portlandian citizenship process can be fast-tracked even beyond 10 years for people who bring honor to the city before the ten year mark, and slowed down for people from hated regions, mostly California—although “Californians of exceptional ability” can be fast-tracked. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, native Washingtonians, were given Portlandian citizenship very early because Sleater-Kinney became one of the greatest indie rock bands of all time, but Brownstein notably had hers revoked in the wake of the great shame that was “Portlandia”. This has never been officially stated by the city council, which doesn’t want anyone to think it’s bothering with such trivialities, but it’s not just convenience that saw Brownstein move to Los Angeles in recent years—she was politely (of course politely, it’s the Northwest after all) asked to leave. This is the kind of thing you hear on the street when you live here. What does this all have to do with my review of the Portland-via-Bend power-pop band Autonomics? Pretty much nothing. But I’m surprised that after three years in this town, it took me until this year to see an Autonomics show. Because, in their genre, I know of few better local bands, and their genre also happens to be my shit. I call them power pop the same way I call my own band power pop—because they play loud pop songs, but if that term conjures to mind the Cars, Weezer, or even Big Star or the dearly departed Exploding Hearts, you’re way off track. I mean it in the most literal sense, pop songs that come at you like a train, written with the refined simplicity and rousing spirit of folk, but loaded with snark and slacker charm, performed with militant precision whose intensity is offset crucially by the band’s endearing charisma. On their most recent album, “Debt Sounds” (the title a wry pun on “Pet Sounds”) which features Kulululu lead guitarist David Burrows lounging shirtless in bed like a Roman king on the cover, they turn in ten tracks of number one hits from some other time when guitar bands had number one hits. Not that they’re a retro band. Despite their unalterably garage aesthetic, the record’s production polishes them up real good, and the band’s songwriting—I assume frontman Dan Pantenberg is the primary songwriter but I’m not sure—is aware of contemporary pop melodic styles even while largely eschewing electronic flourishes, charging forward old school punk style, with boxy, speeding-with-craned-neck beats like the holy Ramones. Pantenberg hasn’t even made it to the second song, “Southern Funeral” before he utters the accursed “Millennial whoop”, and fuck yes it’s catchy as hell, at the same time that it rocks out hard. So many of these songs seem like they could be from contemporary film or TV soundtracks— “She’s Into Death” being one excellent example. The record just rolls on from there, tune after earworm-forming tune. There’s no fucking around, there’s no volume knob, just a switch that moves from 3 to 7 to 11. Tempos are varied, waltz-time is used here and there, but it’s all big and soaring and romantic as all-get-out. Pantenberg has a funny way of expressing that romance—“I wanna be the welfare check that gets you through the week/ I wanna be that superstitious icon you hold when things get too bleak”—but such lyrics, appealing with a wink to the narrator’s material value as a figure of adoration and sheer usefulness, show why we all got sucked into this ongoing “age of irony” in the first place, acknowledging at once the ridiculousness of love—why choose this person out of so many?—and the inevitability of it. Anyone who tells you love is just a chemical reaction is going to get demolished by love sooner or later. This is a band that’s focused very strongly on songwriting, even as they impress with their instrumental air-tightness, which I can assure is reproduced quite well live. But none of the three members of the band—singer-guitarist Dan and, up until very recently, identical twin brothers Evan and Vaughn—seem to be out to draw attention for their prowess on their instruments, in any sense except their own glued-together-ness as a unit. I can’t even really discern Vaughn’s bass parts either live or on the record—I think he mostly just holds down the root notes—and Evan rarely does anything on the drums to say “Hey, here I am! Dun-dummity-dun-dun!”. Again like the Ramones, Autonomics has the rare ability to just play beats and chords and sound like total monsters—the one chord break that happens a couple times in “Southern Funeral” is better than most people’s guitar solos. When solos do appear, they’re short circular melodies, enhanced nicely on the records by lots of fuzz. Their whole vision as a band is utilitarian song-catapult, and man do they fling a song with that thing.
