Hey I was right! And what's more, it's really good!
OK, so only two songs are full-on, nothing-else-you-could-call-them freak folk: You Are My Lungs and Maybe I Won't. Everything else is at the very least freak folk adjacent. Raccoons Prefer Acid sounds like Bardo Pond, Amongst The Saints is acoustic psych, Silver Spiders is a mostly acoustic tune with gorgeous fingerpicked guitar, and The Tide is folkie indie. The other songs are closer to noisy weird indie rock, but then noisy weird indie rock is only two doors down from freak folk to begin with.
I recognize that the above paragraph does not help those of you who are not obsessive music nerds fully conversant with microgenres that are not yet old enough to drink. It is entirely possible that it did not even scan as a paragraph to you, as paragraphs are made of words and I can understand you thinking that none were present. And even those of you who did know what I was talking about probably still have questions about what, specifically, this example of them sounds like, so let's get into that.
Autovox's drums are very, very basic; the word that kept coming to me was "rudimentary." They do so little beyond basic timekeeping that I actually bothered to note that Amongst The Saints has a few fills. And it was only that song, only a few, and they were so no frills even I could've pulled them off (I have sat down at a drum kit once in my entire life, and it did not go well). Thing is though, whoever's drumming--and though both Vincent Krone and Jim Quinlan are credited with percussion, the uniformity of style makes me suspect that the kit proper's always being played by the same person--they do keep time no problem. Either playing that simply or not bringing in someone with more technique was an artistic choice.
Which makes sense, since the key to Autovox's sound is the layering of basic sounds. Krone and Quinlan lay down lots of drones and noises; mixing this thing must've been all kinds of interesting. Nothing is played virtuosically; with the exception of Silver Spiders's fingerpicked acoustic, no single instrument calls attention to itself. Autovox have an entirely holistic sound, everything I noticed is in the contrasts. Raccoons Prefer Acid's waves of distortion and bizarre effects spill all over table that is the metronomic drums, Amongst The Saints starts with acoustic guitar playing rhythm then adds an electric which matches it note for note, transforming the song without altering the part, and Daily Commute contrasts a slow pace with fast moving electric sounds. The vocals are nice and clearly audible through all the noise, the recording and especially mixing really are top notch. The lyrics kind of went past me; to be perfectly frank I'm still learning to write at a blog pace so I've only gotten one listen to each album thus far.
The end result is something with the eccentric charm of a four track bedroom project from the 1990s but cleanly recorded in proper studios. It's weird and pretty, and I really dig it. Time to see if anyone else does.
Discogs comes up empty. There's an electronic duo called Auto.vox who are not the same people, and the handful of other hits are from song titles. Allmusic's got the record but it's a completely empty entry, they don't even have the album art. It's on Spotify and Amazon's selling copies; they list as a CDR (it isn't) and as having explicit lyrics (hm, have to listen more closely) and reveal that the record came out in 2014. Autovox have a Facebook page that all of 166 people are following and that hasn't updated since 2019, it intriguingly shows a third member in the band photo which only makes sense since they were playing out and you can't replicate that sound with just two people onstage. It also links to a website that is now gone, though the Internet Archive has us covered once again. Slim pickings though, as it was bare bones to begin with and the pictures didn't load in the archived version. It does reveal that they were Phoenix locals who moved to Portland, that the third member's name is Mallory, and that they were working on a second album at one point.
p.s. Oh yeah, forgot to mention that the cover of I'm On Fire is pretty neat. They alter the rhythm through drums and rhythm guitar, and then the music takes off running while the vocals stay at the same pace.
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