The Automatic

‘This Is A Fix’

(B-Unique)

“What’s that coming over the hill, is it an albatross? An albatross!” you could almost hear The Automatic sigh to themselves as their world began to unravel last year. Having hit a peak in summer ’06 when ‘Monster’ lived up to its moniker and terrorised airwaves everywhere, then came the accusations that all their songs sounded the same (they did) before perennially annoying (he was) screamy synth-player Pennie left halfway through writing sessions. Vowing to continue and make their new album “more Foo Fightery”, they employed former Yourcodenameis:Milo frontman Paul Mullen – a man to whom the word ‘chorus’ previously involved no-less than 3,403 tempo changes  – on guitars and co-vox and the result is… umm, pretty good actually.

‘This Is A Fix’ is the sound of a band who still know their way round a catchy chorus too – for that, check the endearing dumbness of ‘Steve McQueen’ – but, crucially, there’s a little more going on beneath the surface this time, with wiry Milo-esque licks lurking beneath the FM rock riffery, best demonstrated on album highlight ‘Magazines’. Some of the lyrics still hit the cringe mark (“Touching your skin/Is a victory” goes the quite-frankly-odd opening line of ‘Secret Police’) but, for the most part, ‘This Is A Fix’ is a solid, enjoyable return.

What’s that coming over the hill? It’s an… improvement.

Niall Doherty