The Automatic: 'Tear The Signs Down'

'Tear The Signs Down' is the third album from The Automatic in five years and it is an industrious but hardly outstanding effort.

Unlike many young groups who score a big hit single, The Automatic have actually worked very hard to flesh out an identity, and have quickly developed a back catalogue that seems to steer away from the immediacy of 'Monster'. The small town feel (three of the four members are from Cowbridge in north Wales) is palpable. Like the Kaiser Chiefs and Muse (the latter of whom are also from a gentler part of Britain), The Automatic’s music is characterised by a kind of largesse that seeks to outdo its surrounds.

The influence of those older bands is also clear here; from the Kaiser Chiefs they take a taste for repetition and anthemic attitude, from Muse a kind of fraught intensity that bubbles up in places like a neurosis. Take 'List', the fourth track here, it marches in strident bursts of power chord, before opening up to a chiming higher register that might have been going on all along, providing a chilling underbelly for the song’s bombast. Meanwhile, opener 'Insides' works on a kind of slow burning intensity and has organ sounds woven through it that you imagine the group hearing in a slate grey Welsh chapel. This is a very British rock.

Nonetheless, on 'Interstate' there is a dynamism that comes from 90s US rock - think The Foo Fighters or Smashing Pumpkins. This theme recurs in the angry 'Sweat Heat Noise' and the pumping 'Race To The Heart Of The Sun', where it grows into something almost gothic. Whatever else they do, The Automatic seem determined to remind the mainstream UK guitar scene that it remains possible to put out the sort of full bodied rock music that began to give way, at the turn of the century, to things more fragile or whimsical.

Unfortunately, it is a tiring effort. One of the reasons this kind of music went under is that it was increasingly confirming to a series of expected types and catering to a tight base of listeners who would happily listen to the same bands producing the same records ad infinitum. Many of them moved on from this space and those who are left are catered to by groups who play more closely by the rules and have a heavier rock bent. The Automatic are too predictable to appeal to those who might normally listen to indie records and too experimental for those who read Kerrang.

What we are left with is an album that is restrained and well paced, but lacks texture or emotional and sonic depth. At its best, this record is fun (the minute and a half of penultimate track 'Something Else' is a joyous frenzy that couldn’t last longer), but at worst it is simply dull.



Released on 8th March 2010 by Armoured Records.

Written by Huw Green.