Last year's South By Southwest festival had a lot of high points for me. One of my favorites was meeting Andy Falkous of the late, great Cardiff trio Mclusky. It happened by total coincidence. A friend and I were doing street promotion for another Cardiff band (the excellent Victorian English Gentlemens' Club) when he happened by and we struck up a conversation. Falkous is subdued and polite in person, wholly unlike the short-tempered pugilist the press are eager to depict, and it was interesting to hear him talk about the pleasures and irritations of touring with a new band after the dissolution of another, just as it was beginning to accrue fissible mass -- until we were interrupted by a fan with an industry badge who equated the end of Mclusky with the "world's greatest tragedy."
At this point, I realized there was absolutely no way the forthcoming album from Future Of The Left would be able to avoid running a gauntlet of bullet-point comparisons to Falkous' previous project. Music criticism has become a venue in which artists' stories are evaluated, embellished, and in many cases simply manufactured. If your band splits up at the inception of its cult, it's inevitable that cultists will do things like invent feuds with errant bassists, examine your final work for evidence of creative tension, and at last resort comb through your very personality looking for Billy Corgan.
Just so we aren't accused of shirking our duties, let's go ahead and get the comparison out of the way. Jon Chapple is gone and has been replaced with Kelson Mathias of the prog-friendly Jarcrew, and the outcome is about what you'd expect: instead of Chapple's thuggish take on proto-alternative rock, we get tight, punchy repetition more reminiscent of hardcore and metal from the same era. Mathias assists with the vocal duties as well, and while he's a fine singer, his howl and Falkous's snarl don't mix terribly well when they're both shouting. Finally, whereas Mclusky often made little sense lyrically, their words were by turns evocative and bitingly funny; Future Of The Left have several such moments, but they're eclipsed by a newfound tendency to take a catchphrase and repeat it into the ground, which they do in virtually every song on Curses. It works in "Suddenly, It's a Folk Song," lending the track's payoff a satisfying drama, and in the hilarious non-sequitur that concludes "Manchasm"; but it weakens the bridge in "Fingers Become Thumbs" and nearly ruins "Plague of Onces."
However, there are a number of areas where Future Of The Left are strikingly different from (and better than) their acclaimed predecessor. For a start, the band launch into these numbers with more power, and the songwriting reveals both a contagious sense of mission and a deepening cleverness of craft. Moreover, not only is much of what the band's constituents have been reputed for in the past represented here, there's plenty that they weren't previously known for as well. For example, while "Suddenly, It's a Folk Song" improves on Mclusky's poppier moments and "Fuck The Countryside Alliance" feels like a successor to "Fuck This Band," Mclusky never dabbled in metal the way Future Of The Left do on "Small Bones, Small Bodies," where at times they sound glancingly like Jesus Lizard or Helmet. Likewise, "The Lord Hates A Coward" has plenty more crunch and pummel than even the most aggressive of Mclusky's songs. Ditto for "Real Men Hunt In Packs," though that one suffers a hint from the malaise of repetition that begins to undermine Curses toward its end, making "Team:Seed" a drag and "adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood" totally skippable. However, in this case the band's only error is surplus, and it isn't a deal-breaker.
"The Contrarian" is perhaps the most out-of-character of the songs present. A vaguely vaudevillian piano number, it's a character portrait with overtones of self-recrimination, and one wonders if ending with the words "I give you the future of what you demanded" doesn't betray a bit of frustration with the rigors of expectation. Perhaps I am reading too much into it. Falkous has described his lyrical approach as being more phonophilic than semantic, and, well -- probably so. Nonetheless, there's plenty here to suggest that the future of this band will eventually overshadow Falkous' past; at the moment, Future Of The Left sit comfortably alongside it.
1. The Lord Hates A Coward
2. Plague of Onces
3. Fingers Become Thumbs
4. Manchasm
5. My Gymnastic Past
6. Fuck The Countryside Alliance
7. Suddenly, It's A Folk Song
8. Kept By Bees
9. Small Bones, Small Bodies
10. Wrigley Scott
11. Real Men Hunt In Packs
12. Team:Seed
13. adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood
14. The Contrarian
More about: Future of the Left
