The Juan Maclean
The Future Will Come
Rating: 4.0
Label: DFA Records
Fixated on the future while entrenched heavily in the past, The Juan Maclean’s The Future Will Come resurrects the icy patina of club songs of yore without the negative signifiers, operating on a semi-ironic plane of flat, half-winking vocals and chilly synth strings, an approach that manages to sound ridiculous while also feeling entirely convincing.
Like former bandmate (and now label-mate) James Murphy, Maclean sands down the rough edges of potentially cheesy museum pieces, dusting off old disco conventions but keeping clear of their embarrassing excess through an air of knowing detachment. The results are discomfitingly cold – mechanical exercises dominated by electronic effects. Yet this ironic rapprochement is handled lovingly, as it must be for this kind of approach to work, and as a result the songs still retain a warm, loamy center, which Maclean achieves by putting real thought and feeling into his cold synthetic landscapes.
He has an eye for the comfortably ridiculous, from the pumping breakdown of “One Day,” with the loopy synth line that wanders above it, to “The Station,” which revels in sleazily tinkling keyboard. This silliness is defused by the vocals’ distancing effect, which come across as blasé and far from amused. Maclean pairs up with Nancy Whang on a number of these songs, trading competitive duets that pit their even voices against one another: hers frigid and smooth, his flatly robotic. While the past is a focus, futuristic totems abound, from the album title to the synth and voice effects, which, despite all their fusty connotations, still maintain an anachronistically futuristic feel.
The back and forth between Whang and Maclean defines the album, shaping sharp repartees that assure the songs’ status as the antithesis of standard love ballads. Rather than meld softly, their vocals bounce off each other, coinciding with the album’s theme of miscommunication, expressed in lines like “I call you from the station/ You won’t listen.” The repetitiveness of these simplistic refrains further adds to the dissociative feelings they put across. “Human Disaster” plainly lays out its shattered psyche over a glacial synth wash and lonely, ringing piano notes, with Maclean lamenting: “I wish I could go back to/ A happier time/ I’d issue a warning/ I’d make you an offer.” This dead, clinical view of misery defuses the dancey backing, creating a conflicted musical dissension that coincides with its marriage of future and past.
The album closes with the epic album single “Happy House,” which preceded its album release by a year and now stands in an entirely different context. Alone it is a bouncy, unbounded dance number, full of sunny, grateful lyrics, stretching peacefully over 12 minutes. Here, paired with the dour depression of the rest of the album, it works as another counterpoint. By pairing these seemingly disparate moods, Maclean attaches an air of acceptance to his darkly pessimistic analysis of love. Likewise, The Future Will Come stands as an album of contrasts – the disparate pairing of light grooves with raw, painful emotion-creating dance songs that ache with the cold sterility of unease and loss.
by Jesse Cataldo
