Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

You don’t have to look to far to see how the season invoke the passions of the poet and would be lovers in equal force.

Spring brings that tantalising prospect of hope, the return of order from out the darkness that the Romans largely clumped together and then prayed to their gods that the first flowers would return, summer is the full flush of lust and heat, provoking the poet to seek out wooded glades and spy on the green leaves dancing in anticipation, winter is the time when huddled together before a fire and the thrust of conversation takes place and leaves autumn, with trees that shed their inhibitions and the cinematic landscapes that catch the eye.

It is to the poet and the lover which makes the year worthwhile, the moment in nature between life and death, between memory and loss. It is the uncertainty of The Fall that brings forth realisation that all things must eventually end and then, like a phoenix in flames, become reborn.

The three track maxi single by Minneapolis’ Autumn should not only be seen as a return from the 1990s heyday of the band but as a fresh beginning, a revolution with no bloodshed, a celebration of holding firm that memory of when you were younger and full of spirit and like spring, finding  a way to capture that youthful outlook but with full bodied experience completely.

For Julie Plante, Jeff Leyda and Neil McKay, the melody the tracks, The Fall, its remix and the glory of The Morning After are special, they seek out what is best in the season and whilst we require no evidence of autumn, they supply it with a deep earthy resonance and shades of haunting passion finely woven through the songs as if being stalked by Grendel himself, the fear and the exhilaration pounding in the atmospheric forest as it spies upon the last days of King Hrothgar.

Autumn is the moment of transition, the moment between the full lust of the quickening pulse and the comfort of routine as the year slowly turns to inward reflection and the kicking of leaves that have fallen like soldiers from the battlements; shot by the last arrows of a sun we hope to return.

The Fall has returned, the time is right for the seasons to claim back what was once theirs.

Ian D. Hall