Future Of The Left were born from the ashes of mclusky and Jarcrew back in 2005, and Curses is the much-anticipated début album from the Welsh supergroup. It’s sparse, it’s tight, and it’s as weird as tits on a bishop.
But let’s wind back and start with the basics. Future Of The Left are a three-piece, which goes some way to explaining the sparse and roomy sound, but it’s also much to do with the guitar work stepping back from centre stage. There’s still plenty of filthy riffs, some of them alarmingly catchy, but the barrage of punky chords is absent – and occasionally replaced entirely by a synthesizer.
The rhythm section is metronome tight; strong rigid drumming in open patterns with rumbling distorted basslines following close behind. The melodies veer between angular post-hardcore abstracts and quirky themes that seem to have run away from the circus big-top or a sixties kid’s TV show with a sheet of LSD and a bottle of cheap vodka; the contrast between the two is sharp and refreshing, and full of surprises.
However, the bulk of the strangeness stems from the vocals. Not only are they delivered in manic voices with wild-eyed characterisation that wouldn’t sound out of place at your local mental health institution, the lyrical content is bizarre to the point of being almost inscrutable. One moment they appear to be making some serious social or political commentary about religion or violence, the next they’re doing doubled-up trade-off lines about cats, pickled onions or being “trapped in the darkness by ESP” - and I don’t think they’re referring to the guitar manufacturer. There’s meaning lurking in every song, I’m sure of it, but trying to pin it down is like trying to catch smoke with a fishing net – great fun, good exercise, but utterly impossible.
Future Of The Left appear to have made every effort to make Curses a unique album; it draws on the band’s roots in manic and noisy hardcore, but it ups the ante as far as surreal humour is concerned. The end result is intense, fascinating, and a little bit scary – not so much man-with-a-knife scary as bad-trip-flashback-in-Tesco scary, the sort of experience that is all the more strange for being seemingly based in a reality you know well but can’t quite get back to.
Repeated listens are extremely rewarding - but be warned, it’s a kind of musical conundrum. Every time you think you’ve worked out what’s going on, a dozen new questions will present themselves. So fetch your notepad, and get stuck in.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Curses, Future Of the Left, hardcore, metal, post-hardcore, punk, weird
