Austin Sound

“Get Haunted.” It’s a helluva an imperative for a debut LP, and one that that’s not entirely misdirected. For the Authors, it certainly seems less an invitation than a demand, a necessity. For listeners, it’s a useful point of entry for digging into the sound the local quartet excavates. In retrospect, the Authors 2009 debut EP is a fitting build up to their initial full-length – that disc delivered heavy on potential but was somewhat quelled by both a want of edge and focus. Those are certainly not problems for Get Haunted, but chasing ghosts opens an entirely different sort of challenges. And there are a lot of ghosts swirling throughout the album, flashpoints in sound that make the Authors’ seem eerily familiar, yet still uncannily unique.

And isn’t that what getting haunted is all about? That sense of something past and still lingering in consciousness, yet displaced enough and with enough shock to grab our attention, to not entirely fit in. If their eponymous EP got somewhat lost in its innocuous polish, that haunted sound of influence fading too easily into the background as to disappear, then their full-length forces itself back to the surface, demanding attention even if it’s just through the peripheral glance of something moving just beyond our awareness - something edgy enough to put us on edge.

Get Haunted is saturated with sonic cues conjuring the past. Most blatant is the effectively channeled 80’s, post new-wave pop, which rises clearest in the clipped guitar licks and undeniable influence of the Police on “Never Know.” The tune might not have worked without the raggedly jittered opener “Timebomb”, though, a song that would follow more in the wake of the Jam and immediately sets things in intense physical motion. Likewise, “Feels Like Running” follows with the dark and gloomily drenched vocals that would gesture more towards Echo & the Bunnyman or even the Cure – in other words, haunted, but with as much a familiar pop edge as a doomed morbidity. “And I feel you coming round again,” Justin Prater wails as the guitars begin to strafe with increased intensity.

Add to these instances the rest of the album’s topside tracks that shoot in equally resonating, but divergent directions. “Battles” fights itself out of the Eighties into a chorus that is late Nineties’ NYC, a joining forces of the Police and Interpol. “Halo” then pumps a guitar line from Ben Meza that could have been lifted straight from Sonic Youth’s Rather Ripped. By the time we get to the synth-buzzing title track, then, it seems the Authors have been all over the musical map.

Yet picking at these at the sonic foundations doesn’t do justice to what the Authors have put together. It’s easy to glean these moments that pique a familiar sound, but in all these tunes, those elements remain just that - elusive moments that settle for a moment only to dart off in the Authors’ own self-determined direction. And moreover, as a whole, the first half of the album propels itself well, keeping the listener guessing and engaged.

The backside of the album proves equally compelling and deceptively dance-floor inducing, even if that initial focus begins to wane. “Ashes” rises to falsetto against a solid bass groove courtesy Jon Haben, and indeed much of the second half of the album is more heavily propelled by the rhythm section, through “Look Back” and “By a Thread.” It’s a good balance as the vocals begin to fluctuate more and more uneasily, even to the point of drifting too far afield on tunes like “Put it On.” But for the most part, the solidified rhythm works to keep heads bopping despite the vocal contortions.

While the Authors’ debut LP want blow any minds, it is a smart album and proves the band is worth the local attention they’re beginning to get. They’ve come back from their EP with something that stands out, that simultaneously hits familiar musical cornerstones while building well on top of it. The next move will be determined by whether the band can continue to exorcise their hauntedness enough for more of themselves to emerge. But of course the beauty of ghosts is that you can still look through them to what lies ahead.

Websites:
www.theauthorsmusic.com
Myspace