The Return of Autolux (Boston Phoenix, 9.2.09)

The reason people have stayed tuned in is pretty simple: Future Perfect was forehead-smackingly good and hasn't gotten any worse with time. Born from the remains of '90s alt-rock groups (Edwards played bass in Failure and drummer Carla Azar played in Ednaswap; bassist/vocalist Eugene Goreshter completes the line-up), the band latched onto washy shoegazer guitar tropes, muggy drumming, and heavy clouds of mood and hung them up on a toothpick framework that gets better every time you listen. It wasn't current — Azar's lopsided beats looked ahead to an approach Portishead would bite two years later, and some of the guitars went back to Cobain and Corgan and even Brainiac. But that's what ruled about it. Since the release of Future Perfect in 2004 and the following year of touring, they've run into some rough patches. DMZ, which was run by T Bone Burnett (he produced Future Perfect), dissolved in 2006, leaving them orphaned inside the Columbia mega-label bureaucracy. They landed in the Epic division, but Edwards says relations fizzled there after the band failed to produce a new record on demand. "After we did that first record, I almost had an anxiety attack anytime I thought about having to record again. There's no way I could envision it, because everything is contingent on this series of accidents."