AU Press Tent

Info on AU’s new album Both Lights and the Solid Gold 7” + tour dates, MP3s, photos, and more.

Hometapes 050
AU Both Lights
LP / CD / DIG

01. Epic
02. Get Alive
03. Crazy Idol
04. OJ
05. The Veil
06. Solid Gold (MP3)
07. Today/Tonight
08. Why I Must
09. Go Slow
10. Old Friend
11. Don’t Lie Down

RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2012 (April 2 in EU via The Leaf Label)

COVER ART (ABOVE): 300dpi or 72dpi

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Both Lights hit me like a wave. I walked right into it, eyes open.
The music writer Bob Palmer once described “a fusion of music and poetry accomplished at a very high emotional temperature.” He called it “a gigantic field of feeling…something enduring, something that could be limitless.”
Palmer was talking about the Blues. But all I can think about is AU.

Like all waves, it keeps on coming. AU’s third album, Both Lights, is a recurring dream. Eleven songs made by the Portland, Oregon-based duo Luke Wyland and Dana Valatka, it’s a story of Time. Three years to be exact: since their critically-acclaimed 2008 album Verbs and its 2009 EP evolution Versions, there’s been a long exhale. A little defiance of the double-speed countdown of the indie hype clock. And a hell of a lot of living. Turn it on. More than a mere accompaniment, it’s a gleaming mirror. It’s an exaltation, an exhalation, a monument of extreme composition, the child of collaboration and isolation, a preamble to a wild live show, a statue intact in the violent wind of art and commerce, and, simply, a record about love. It’s for itself, and, in being that, it’s an album that can be understood like a person. “It’s the topography of me,” says Wyland. So you follow the coordinates.

The record begins with “Epic” — count it among the world’s greatest lead tracks. Complete with earth-cracking saxophones by man-machine Colin Stetson, “Epic” defines ascension — from the slow motion of an Oregon sunrise to a ‘67 Barracuda barreling off a bridge. It’s a thesis statement for an album that began as a series of improvisations in Wyland’s attic, a one-man tug of war with love, loss, pain, anger, and desire. Wyland calls “Epic” a “real re-introduction to the band” and it encompasses that extreme confidence. It sets the tone for Both Lights, illuminating the frantic energy that drives AU, on and off stage.

Titled like a directive, second track “Get Alive” marks the first reveal of Wyland’s soaring vocals. Multi-tentacled, he’s playing banjo and keys as Valatka turns his drum kit into a veritable mode of transportation. He’s crossing over. You can hear the cymbals bending mid-air. Nick Sweet and Alex Milsted, who make appearances throughout the album on brass, keep step up the mountainside. Portland’s Holland Andrews is waiting at the top for a climactic last-verse duet: “I’ve been alive for so long, you’ve been dead all these years, if love is what we wait for, I’ve made you wait.” “Crazy Idol” hovers at the peak, a hymn in classic AU style, the deep breath before the dive into the machine-like, breakout-dance-jam “OJ”. “Coded language, hidden thoughts, a shroud of technological wonder…almost a subliminal expression of my insect state.” Wyland’s description of “OJ” extends into a laid-bare definition of AU. Both Lights is a homemade album. It’s about breaking up. It’s about finding oneself, again and again. It’s about the struggle to make what you make and give it to the world. It’s the glowing spectrum of carnival lights and it’s the pitch-black wooded walk home. It’s your heart racing.

By “The Veil”, the last song on side A, you are breathing at just the right pace to accompany the piano, a first-take improvisation from beginning to end, recorded on a long summer day. Flip the record. “Solid Gold”, unveiled this past December on a limited edition 7”, ushers in side B and marks Colin Stetson’s second appearance on the album. You can feel it. Like the fight song for an imaginary sport, this single defines AU’s transcendent freneticism and abundant tenderness. It permeates everything they touch. It sets the stage for the supreme freak-out ecstasy of “Why I Must” and the continuous three-song suite that closes out the album by opening it up even further. You can hear guest vocalist Sarah Winchester’s voice tremble on “Old Friend,” an ode to a singer who’s been on every AU album: her.

In its eleven songs, Both Lights constructs new sonic and psychological terrain for the listener. It unfolds like a story, both in its hyper-attentive, graceful, and often fierce instrumentation — the language of Wyland and Valatka — and in its heated and naked emotion. “This is all inner struggle, inner growth, inner seeking,” said Wyland. Set to music, life sounds like AU.

-Sara Padgett Heathcott, Hometapes

AU Both Lights will be released on LP, CD, and digitally by Hometapes on April 3, 2012, including an exclusive license to The Leaf Label for release in Europe that same week. AU will tour North America in February and March, including appearances at SXSW. The AU Solid Gold 7” is available now from Hometapes.

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Hometapes 049
AU Solid Gold 7”

Side A: Solid Gold (MP3)
Side B: under/Epic (feat. Colin Stetson)

The AU Solid Gold 7” is limited to 500 copies. The transparent yellow-orange 45 RPM vinyl is packaged with full-color transparent cover art in a heavy PVC jacket. Digital download included.

COVER ART:

DOWNLOAD: 300dpi or 72dpi

What are you hearing when you hear AU?
What are you seeing when you see AU?

These are the questions I’ve been asking myself over the past few months of getting to know Luke Wyland and Dana Valatka. Stroll down the street with them or see them side-by-side on stage: this Portland, Oregon-based duo embodies remarkable, frantic energy. It permeates everything they touch. More than any band I’ve ever known, AU brings into question the moment and where you are in it.

AU is on the verge of the release of their third album, Both Lights, due out on Hometapes (and the Leaf Label in Europe) this coming Spring. A bona fide long-time-coming following 2008’s acclaimed LP Verbs (and still-memorable tours with Why? and Deerhoof), AU is boldly throwing open the curtains of time with their first single: “Solid Gold” is out today on a limited-edition 7” record. Fortifying Valatka’s adrenalized percussion and Wyland’s soaring vocals and multi-tentacled performance on keys and guitar, is man-machine Colin Stetson on alto and whopping bass saxophone (most recently seen on stage with Bon Iver). The B-side, a song woven by Wyland himself from a reinterpretation of the album’s lead track, takes Stetson’s wild wind a notch higher and into the brightly lit stratosphere.

AU reflects that light. “Solid Gold” is the first taste of a sweeping aural experience that captures not only the journey of Wyland and Valatka through the past three years of love, loss, and levity, but the voyage music can take us all on if we click play and just listen. “The back and forth, the tug of war for love,” writes Wyland, getting at the root of “Solid Gold”, in essence a love song, “exhausting, exhilarating, and so totally not sustainable.” Like the best songs, in some way or another, we can all sing along to that.

-Sara Padgett Heathcott, Hometapes

ARTIST IMAGES:

Image #1

Photographer: Seppi Ramos

DOWNLOAD: 300dpi or 72dpi