In the early and mid-eighties, when I was in college and shortly afterwards, my music collection gained a lot of bulk from taping friends', siblings', and roommates' records and tapes. Since cassettes are relatively cheap, I wasn't exactly discriminating - I could always tape over something I didn't like, and who knows that I wouldn't someday come to like something that didn't impress me much at first. There are a whole raft of such tapes sitting in my attic, with albums by largely forgotten folks like, uh, the Close Lobsters, collecting dust and losing oxidation over time. Autohaze sounds astonishingly like one of those bands. First, there's something very eighties in the sound - a time when Australians were hip, and harmony vocals came drenched in reverb. The songs aren't quite catchy yet although they're trying. They raise a certain half-hearted cheer, so half-hearted it shades nearly into mournfulness. This mood suffuses the songs and evokes a nostalgia similar to the feeling I have listening to those early eighties tapes I seldom listen to anymore. Unfortunately, Autohaze doesn't affect me enough to allow its CD to escape a fate similar to those tapes - collecting dust in the attic, also-rans a decade too soon.

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