Mechanical Animals - The Automatic

Whether it’s exuberant yet threatening yobs on buses yelling with beery enthusiasm or rock n roll spunk on your cornflakes thanks to their unorthodox GMTV appearance, there really is no escaping The Automatic.  A whirlwind 12 months has seen them ascend way above the Welsh hills of their homeland: they’ve ripped up the nations vocal chords with the meteoric ‘Monster’, created festival mudbaths with their gloriously screeched-up cover of Goldigga and ascended the music press’ throne to become their crowned princes.  “It has come quickly” Frost (guitar) muses, “At the same time it feels like ages.  We’ve been together since we were eleven so it’s almost ten years now”, Rob adds.

This is, then, no product of the wave of three chord Topshop indie, and it shows.  Rather than every word of the interview swaggered with cocksure arrogance, The Automatic seem genuinely pleased and humble of their success.  Bearing in mind they’re all about 21, they’re all sweetly mature, genuine and clearly hardworking. “I guess we’ll have to prove ourselves this year and sort out our new stuff, whenever we get round to doing that.  There’s a lot of pressure”, frontman Rob explains.

As well as these wholesome qualities, it’s The Automatic’s skilful genre-avoidance that has perhaps cemented their accomplishments.  The key to media-darlingdom appears to be in aping whatever seems to be pasted over ‘what’s hot and what’s nots’, so they could have simply coiffed themselves into asymmetrical fringed whingers, adding fuel to the ‘war on emo’ fire. Or, perhaps, thrown in a token air-horn on the route to wide-eyed ‘new rave’ neon fiascos.  Instead, however, they bravely trod the path to simple, yet original good old fashioned pop songs.  Where Art Brut declared their epic intention to “write a song as universal as Happy Birthday”, The Automatic arguably achieved it in ‘Monster’.  Football hooligans, prisoners, school kids and actual music fans united in 2006 to its inescapable chorus.  “The actual chorus sounds like something you’ve heard before. It’s so easy to latch onto for so many age groups, the actual chorus is so catchy.” Iwan (drums) explains.

Pennie, however, attributes its omnipotence to something a little more intellectual: “Lyrically it’s quite imaginative, you can kind of make it what you want.  I think it’s quite easy for people to latch onto it and make it what they think it is coz it’s so kind of vague and metaphorical. I think it’s what they call a crossover song, coz it works in indie discos and it works on the radio and it also works at football matches.  The chorus itself is a metaphor; it’s not literally about a monster.  It’s a song about binge drinking and club culture.  You’re meant to ask yourself ‘are you a monster, is there a monster in you’.”

However, behind all successes is the ever-present whip of commercial backlash, as they have already witnessed in their short career.  Despite countless superlative reviews, a certain all-colour publication seems unable to resist the occasional dig: “we had one really bad live review,” Frost shrugs.  “That’s coz the reviewer was in our dressing room drinking our champagne before.  He was in there taking the piss and then went and gave us a bad review!” Rob exclaims of the injustice in media Bollinger-fuelled slayings.