Future of the Left
Travels with Myself and Another
Rating: 4.5/5.0
Label: 4AD
Band break-ups, obviously, are not good. Apart from the typical whining about how the band was just hitting their stride (or not), and how some psychotic significant other is responsible for it all (or not), and how this band member was the real artist and this one was the poppy writer who took the band down the pathway to MOR nonsense (or not), there's also just the purely selfish thought many fans immediately have: the projects the members embark on afterward will be uniformly crap. It's true: with the exception of, say, New Order or the first two albums by The Breeders and 35% of Lou Reed and John Cale's careers, almost anything members of a beloved band do after a breaking up is astonishingly awful. So here's the thing: Mclusky were quite possibly the best band of the last decade that nearly no one heard.
Not since the Jesus Lizard (whose producer, Steve Albini, they shared) had there been a more insane, hilarious and just plain wrong group of blokes; they made songs with titles like "The World Loves Us and Is Our Bitch" and "Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues," and that's just from Mclusky Do Dallas. Their equipment bore the slogan "fuck this band" and when they played, entire cities were left twitching and spent in their wake. They released three stellar albums and called it quits in 2005 after tensions between bassist Jonathan Chapple and guitarist/vocalist Andy Falkous became increasingly taxing. Chapple went on to form Shooting At Unarmed Men, whose most memorable aspect is their name. Chapple, you see, fulfills the rule I've described; I have to thank him for being a sacrificial lamb, because Future of the Left, the project formed by Falkous and drummer Jack Egglestone alongside new recruit Kelson Mathias from the similarly retired Jarcrew, is fucking fantastic.
FOL's second album, Travels with Myself and Another, is everything you could possibly want from the latter-day project of your now defunct favorite band. It's similar enough to the core aesthetic of Mclusky without sounding redundant, but it also offers up enough change and potential to suggest that this might just be the group to succeed on a wider scale than Falkous's previous outfit. The most prominent change, which has been reported to death elsewhere, is the addition of keyboards and synths to Falkous's instrumental arsenal. As is true with his guitar playing, the electronics in FOL don't sound like instruments so much as drills, weapons and intensity incarnate. Witness "Throwing Bricks at Trains," which begins like a more spastic Oneida number or the more recent work by Parts and Labor, before the throbbing bass and stop-start vocals take over. The guitars are absent but not missed; backing vocals that alternately call and respond and coo like asylum inmates just before the lunch bell rings instead act as the sweet melancholy to Falkous's Joker-on-a-bender lead vocal line.
The more important change - the change everyone should be talking about - is that FOL is as tight as a legion of storm troopers, in sync in the way industrial machinery is, the bass and drums shackled together, the guitar set loose on the edges of the tracks, chewing scenery and snapping at listeners. Mclusky, by contrast, thrived on being loose; Chapple's bass playing, phenomenal as it so often was, seemed more interested in being a slack motherfucker than an intimidating tour de force. This is not to say that FOL have lost the sense that anything could happen, or that Falkous has shaped up; instead, the band appears to be more focused, capable of a precise attack rather than the type of drunken clusterfuck Mclusky so excelled at. Egglestone's drums are largely responsible for this, his playing more dynamic this time around, stopping altogether at perfect moments, dancier at others, but altogether more nuanced than the type of John Bonham on steroids percussion he used to dabble in.
The group especially come into their own when they leave Mclusky behind for good, as on "The House That Hope Built," which is exactly what Queens of the Stone Age should be doing instead of getting closer and closer to being Black Sabbath's bastard child. With vocals that have more in common with the chants of the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz than anything human, "House" sounds uniquely weird, the type of song that you listen to repeatedly just to make sure what you heard is real. Elsewhere "I Am Civil Service" is enough to make the most menacing of Brooklyn bands piss their pants, its proclamations that "I love what I kill/ And I kill what I love" infinitely more convincing than any "off with her head" threat could ever hope to be and still just as danceable.
Another standout is "You Need Satan More Than He Needs You," which amazingly manages to live up to the potential promised by what is, undoubtedly, up there as one of the greatest song title of all time. Buzzing, maniacal synths? Check. Drums that sound like they were sampled from Satan's own drum core? Check. A bassline that doesn't sound at all like it could have come from a human? Check. Throw Falkous's demented snarling on top and you'd already have one of the most effective songs about the Fallen in recent memory but to make it even better there's the chorus, voices shouting the title ad infinitum. Oh, and yes, there's this, which I may or may not have already tattooed across my chest in solidarity: "Yeah, sure, Satan rules/ But that doesn't mean I can't be practical."
Not all of the experiments in style work though. "Yin/Post-Yin" could be a song by Trio if it weren't for Falkous's yelps. "Lapsed Catholics" appears to be a horrible misstep of an album closer, until with only a minute or so left the band unleashes their full potential in one massive burst of sound that miraculously manages to be the best possible end to such a devastating work, almost letting you forget the surreal three minutes that precede it.
Already my coworkers are looking at me as though I've finally lost it. I've only been playing this album nonstop for a week. High art this is not, but damned if it won't more than likely wind up being the work I've enjoyed the most this year. My only criticism? Other than it being too fucking short, there is one thing, and this is a very important point, one that hints at much greater things to come from this group: the moments that sound like Mclusky through and through just need to go. As great as "Land of My Formers" is, it gets in the way of my enjoyment of Future of the Left, a band that is extremely close to making me forget about Mclusky altogether and that, my friends, is no small feat.
by Morgan Davis