Autre Ne Veut + Henry Wagons featuring Alison Mosshart | Track reviews

“Play by Play”
Autre Ne Veut

Arthur Ashin is all about the slow build. As Autre Ne Veut, he weaves artificial tones into lush, electro-tinged, emotionally charged tapestries. “Play by Play” is the work of one man yet it feels enormous. Crystalline synthesizers and sustained, throbbing bass are threaded into a lustrous whole that swells gradually amid ricocheting, mechanized percussion. Ashin’s carefully assembled pastiche is shamelessly retro, fetishizing the New Romantic sounds of the ’80s, but thoroughly contemporary in the way it recontextualizes them. When he says, “I just called you up to get that play by play,” there’s more than a hint of desperation in his voice, soulful and elastic but tortured. It’s a mode he mines throughout his second album, which carries the loaded title Anxiety. Then again, it could be a simple case of FOMO (fear of missing out)—dude just wants the details.

Autre Ne Veut plays Schubas Saturday 2.