Review: Autobahn – ‘Dissemble’


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First, allow us an imperative: there are no bands that sound like Joy Division. Except Joy Division.

This is an important statement in the context of talking about both ‘Dissemble‘ and Autobahn, the Leeds band who made it. Important simply because through lazy interpretation of the songs it contains, a direct line of influence is being drawn between the features of the two.

This isn’t to say that there is a complete distinction, or that ‘Dissemble’ doesn’t have numerous overt references to the late 1970s miserabilst oeuvre pioneered by Curtis/Hook/Sumner/Morris and loved by obsessive young men in raincoats.

But if anything, the pivotal qualities of Joy Division’s music – claustrophobia, guilt, alienation – are peripheral to the Leeds band’s heightened sense of atmosphere (sic), their songs less other-wordly than the soundscapes that emerged via the alchemy of Martin Hannett’s chronically austere, technocrat production.

Part of a rapidly expanding cabal of, to use the vernacular of the time, “alternative” acts from the city, the quintet are really closest in tone to fellow Loiners Eagulls, whose eponymous debut album, released in 2014, mined similarly coruscating themes and reveled in the dystopian sneer of early Public Image Limited.

‘Dissemble’ is similarly bleak, but leans more heavily on West Yorkshire’s contribution to the post-punk melting pot, one that was maligned and ridiculed in many circles: goth. Wrapped in a metaphorical sheen of dry ice, the swirling twin guitars of Michael Pedel and Gavin Cobb grind their way through songs like ‘Deprivation‘ and ‘Suicide Saturday‘, both chiseled from the same eldritch grimoire, singer Craig Johnson intoning starkly monochrome couplets like, “As I call out your name/In the dead of the night”.

Zooming out, the lines elsewhere are clearer. Opener ‘Missing In Action‘ blasts loose from an escalating drum-fill like an avalanche, Johnson overwhelming the screeching riffs and muscular bass with a stream of barked desperation. On ‘Society‘ – fittingly for the times a song about the shortcomings of ours and a vain wish for greater tolerance – the sulphorous murk parts briefly, the singer willing finally calling upon himself to animate, to scintillating effect.

As uncompromising as much of this album is, there’s the occasional feeling that, oddly, Autobahn might not be taking things as seriously as some of their paraphernalia suggests. As such, where ‘Passion‘ contorts and eventually suffocates itself as if in the grip of some great centrifuge of angst, the war cry of ‘Ostentation‘ is set off against a less totalitarian chassis, occasionally pop in the sense that back in another century the likes of Bauhaus and the Sex Gang Children grazed the mainstream without ever being comfortable in daylight, or with the straight world’s conventions.



As you may have gathered, none of this sounds even vaguely like Joy Division. This is because no band has a monopoly on grain, of the electro-chemical soup that our neuroses enslave us with. ‘Dissemble’ is an album that’s aloof, in the present and crackling with an energy beyond its moving parts.

Autobahn are traveling where there’s no speed limit.

(Andy Peterson)


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