Postmodern Dream Records
The ability of certain bands to successfully incorporate music from another era into the new millennium and give it a twist of its own, all without straying too far from its roots makes groups like The Killers or The Darkness commercially successful. There are bands that have been able to do this. Autohypnosis, unfortunately, is not one of those bands.
Autohypnosis is the work of one man, Nathan Stack, from Greensboro, N.C. With his new album, The Surface, Stack attempts to blend together the music of his favorite band, Duran Duran, as well as Depeche Mode and Pink Floyd. While all three of these band’s influences can be heard throughout the album, along with a number of other electronic-oriented bands, the result Stack is left with is lackluster and repetitive. Stack seems content with keeping the dream of so many bands from the 1980s with their overuse of a synthesizer and, in that regard, he passes with flying colors. Keyboards twinkling in every song combined with Stack’s baritone and slow, deliberate bass lines produce an effect not altogether unpleasant to hear but just plain boring. The opener “Fractured Beauty” features Stack chanting, “I’m in love with your fractured beauty,” over a lame synth line, all while a bass guitar plods along in the background. Next, “Electricity” has Stack musing over an even more lame synth line, “There’s something bigger going on / I can’t see it, but I can sure feel it — electricity.” “The Numbers,” the album’s best track out of the five on the EP, does have some interesting drum work, but otherwise offers the same in terms of lyrical prowess and song structure. “Absence of,” the album’s 12-minute instrumental finale, sounds as if Stack just took the four other songs on the album, took the words out and meshed them together. With synth lines corny enough to make the band Europe cringe, Stack desperately tries to carry on the dying breed of ’80s electronic-oriented pop/rock bands, but to no avail. Stack’s Web site, Nathanstack.com, says he is happy to be “creating music that is artistically — but not financially — successful for years to come,” and with the quality of his newest release, it looks like his own dreams may come true.