Album Review: Autobahn – The Moral Crossing


The Moral Crossing



Of all the things that followed in punk’s wake, the ‘post’ era has had a creative influence on British music that’s comfortably the most disproportionate to its commercial impact; truncated by Ian Curtis’ tragic death in May 1980, in reality it had already been superseded by those working in the less constricting envelope which Paul Morley had sagely dubbed as ‘new pop’.

Away from the acts which consciously chose Top Of The Pops’ relative glamour, its fraying threads would lead to the blanker, more aggressive hardcore and oi! scenes – an exhilarating but short-lived mod revival – and eventually a movement which would launch a multi generational sub culture: goth.

Initially wrapped around the work of Siouxsie And The Banshees, Bauhaus and The Cure, it would gradually become more flamboyant and less interesting until a late 90’s revival and the birth of streampunk’s more visually progressive tropes.

Autobahn’s first album, Dissemble, contained some of goth’s pigmentation, occasional glimpses of its nihilism and the spidery, multi-layered cul-de-sacs of gloom and premonition, but on The Moral Crossing what were formerly ghosts just out of shot become central players; having grown out of post punk’s emotionally barren construct, the Leeds outfit now have oppression and guilt turned up to 11.

There’s an obvious link here; goth’s Crowleyists-in-chief were The Sisters Of Mercy, who spent the early 1980s living in a terraced house known locally as ‘The Pharmacy’, and released a string of definitive material (Alice, Temple Of Love, Marian and a hoary, coals-to-Newcastle version of The Stooges’ 1969) before eventually going overground with rapidly diminishing returns on all fronts.

The quintet share a home with this legacy and some of its values; The Moral Crossing was produced in their own recording space in Holbeck, the city’s grim post-industrial red light district, whilst singer and spokesman Craig Johnson has introduced it in character, proclaiming, “Melancholy and darkness, and dissonant, uncomfortable music resonates with us, for whatever reason…the new record is more melancholy than dissonant. I feel we’re just opening up a bit more”.

As its title suggests, The Moral Crossing is about choices and consequence; the six-minutes-plus of the title-track featuring the lines, “The will of every man/Who dies by the sword”, whilst Johnson’s reverb soaked voice is full of melodrama and sanctity, a man given up to proclamations over cascading, relentless drum fills and a bleakly epic backdrop.

Whether he’s deliberately attempting to sound like Sisters frontman Andrew Eldritch is up to debate, but the similarity is there, an atonal drama that wrenches power from songs like Execution (Rise) and Fallen, the latter a more considered take than the former, gilded by the addition of cello and violin, a subtlety which prevents the band’s dual guitarists Michael Pedel and Gavin Cobb from overloading the listener with unnecessary brute force.

Far from isolating people, Autobahn’s mission paradoxically is to indirectly bring joy, strands of light peaking through their fundamentalist approach; Johnson describes their motivation being that, “Saying this stuff out loud gives the feeling that there’s a future”. These possibilities even have a track named after them, and Future is a positively dappled synth-pop respite, whilst both Low/High and the brooding, redemptory Creation feature a neighbourhood gospel choir, cementing a philosophy which sees them embrace the grey of our existence and forces confrontation with what we would otherwise choose to ignore.



Part of the reason for post-punk’s rapid demise at the time was its long list of off limits gestalt, as a form of expression its refusal to acknowledge the emotional opposites to paranoia and loneliness left it lop sided and incomplete. The Moral Crossing is as sonically brave as any record you’ll hear in 2017, unafraid to seek ecstasy from despair, rejecting our need for absolute simplicity and the clean lines of tokenistic thought.

Bring the pain.

(Andy Peterson)


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