Future of the Left – How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident
(5/5)
These days it’s easy to be pissed off. Six years after the biggest financial
disaster since the Great Depression, Wall Street continues its game of risky
bets while the rest of us are shouldering a tepid recovery; when it’s not
trying to replace school teachers with computers, Silicon Valley seems intent
on producing time wasting apps and obnoxious looking techno-glasses, and they
almost certainly will be the next financial bubble to burst; the U.S.
government has been spying on its citizens and foreign leaders for years, and
they somehow managed to convince the nation’s largest media conglomerates to
defend the practice; while maintaining a go nowhere war in Afghanistan, the
U.S. is also haphazardly bombing “terrorists” halfway around the world, making
it that much easier to recruit more terrorists; and instead of getting upset at
the state of things, the masses are too busy staring at their cell phones or
watching vapid reality television shows.
I think we can all admit that the world is well and truly fucked.
At least this seems to be the assessment of the sardonically
named, Future of the Left. Hailing from Wales, Future
of the Left can spit vitriol like none other, and their latest album, How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident,
is no exception. Over the years, lead
singer Andrew Falkous has mastered the angry rant. You may or may not know what’s making him
irritable, but you can be certain he is truly, righteously enraged and, from the
sounds of it, probably for good reason.
This kind of indignant anger can be difficult to maintain for the long
haul, so it comes as somewhat of a surprise that How to Stop Your Brain, the band’s fourth full length, somehow
manages to be the band’s best album yet.
The crew in Future of the Left has crafted a series of bone hard songs
capable of tackling any target within sight.
The album starts off punchy with the stuttering “Bread,
Cheese, Bow and Arrow,” an explosive diatribe from a naïve everyman living a
world that has left him behind. The
song’s narrator repeatedly insists he’s “just a man of simple things” before
describing his powerlessness. In a line
that deftly weaves between absurdity and commentary, Falkous sings, “Once I
dreamt of owning my own home/and renting six bedrooms…but ambition encoded in
an economy dominated/by forces so deep they confound themselves.” Here, a typical middle class man expecting to
live out his boring bourgeois life is stymied by economic forces so convoluted
even the supposed geniuses on Wall Street couldn’t keep the under control.
The strength of Falkous’s diatribes lies in how you could
imagine them delivered either by the homeless many down the street or by an
ultra-righteous protester shouting through a bullhorn. This is evident in what for my money is the
album’s triptych centerpiece: “Singing of the Bonesaws,” “I Don’t Know What You
Ketamine,” and “French Lessons.” These
are perhaps the three strongest back to back songs in Future of the Left’s
career, and they’re a superb showcase of the diversity and dynamics of the
album. In “Bonesaws” Falkous affects a
fake upper class English accent in order to narrate a twisting tale of reality
television and existential epiphanies.
The song plays out as if the surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel had decided
to start a punk rock band. The posh
faux-accent serves as a mask for the depressing emptiness of popular culture,
including a new reality television show where a man dressed as a bear who is
angry about losing his pension chases down Kim Kardashian. During the filming of the show the entire
crew suddenly comes to the conclusion that “They have wasted the precious gift
of life which has been/given to them by science!” and begin self-mutilating
themselves. There are too many fantastic
lines in the song to recount here, but I’m a particular fan of this swipe at
the BBC Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal: “Our survey says pedophiles run the
BBC/But look at the alternatives!”
“Ketamine” showcases Future of the Left’s ability to allow a
song to build until they completely let loose in the last third of the running
time. Helpfully, it also matches a
superlative song title with a killer song.
(My pet peeve is when an amazing song title is let down by the song it’s
attached to). The explosive ending to
“Ketamine” fittingly leads into the relatively understated “French Lessons,”
the one song that isn’t engulfed in fury.
While Falkous’s lyrics are just as surreal, the song, which ostensibly
touches upon relationships and drinking for twelve hours straight, feels honest
even as it’s obtuse.
There are plenty of jabs at the music industry throughout
the album, which makes sense considering Future of the Left avoided the usual
recording rigmarole by fundraising online.
This populous support may have helped reinvigorate the band, because How to Stop Your Brain manages to best
even their 2009 effort Travels with
Myself and Another, which was such a fantastic album that at the time I was
certain they would never beat it. At this
point, it’s probably best not to underestimate this band.
