An amazing show at the Rock ‘n Roll Hotel tonight—Future of the Left are certainly one of the finest working bands today. They’re funny, they’re kinetic, they’re worth your time.
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The finale involved the bass player giving me his bass to make noise on:
Ridiculous. Good times.
A while ago, Matt Yglesias linked to this band, Future of the Left—presumably because the first song, Arming Eritrea, tickled him. He’d been writing on U.S. policy in Ethiopia for a while, and bands with any kind of even remote awareness of current affairs are fairly rare.1
My friend Hank has since been telling me to give the band more of a listen. I’ve owned the album for a few months now, but I never really found it too compelling. It might be that my judgment was being clouded by the band’s heritage. Two of the members of FotL are from Mclusky, a band that no shortage of friends had told me, as a Jesus Lizard fan, I absolutely must get into.
Well, I tried, and I couldn’t really understand the comparison. Mclusky was brutish and heavy, math rock for the sake of math rock, with unpleasant metal influences throughout. The Jesus Lizard, for all their cacophony, are only incidentally mathy and complicated—inventive musicians making aggressive, somewhat demented music with a subtle sense of humor permeating their whole oeuvre. Mclusky is like a pile driver to Jesus Lizard’s scalpel.
It turns out Future of the Left is a different kettle of fish. Though not beyond delivering a knuckledragger every so often, they’ve set out to to fuse the best of 90s noise rock with a melodic new wave sensibility. And largely they’ve succeed swimmingly. Look no further for the epitome of their project than I Am Civil Service:
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Shellac meets Franz Ferdinand. Or better put, pure Shellac with a melodic Franz Ferdinand bridge, except it’s a bridge to nowhere. Civil Service is a punishing one-part song with several subtle, excellent permutations. The trick starting at 1:36, where the bass switches from the guitar’s syncopated rhythm to a repeated note, switching the note with every repetition, is a classic Bob Weston technique. The finale could end A Minute.
Consider me converted.
EDIT: What timing!
It’s far from clear how much FotL actually understand anything. The lyrics to the song start off as some kind of plea by an adolescent for autonomy, and then proceed to the punchline:
I could have made these excuses in my sleep, As if anyone had doubted them at all, But if we arm Eritrea then we won’t have to pay her And everyone can go home.
Almost gets to Matt’s points, but it’s not clear if it’s what they meant, given the overall context. Could be worse, of course—it’s a damned rock song. ↩
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