It's been seven long years since the last new release from the Future Sound of London. The year 1996 brought "Dead Cities," arguably one the best of their career, but undeniably a defining album of the genre that pushed the boundaries of experiment and amalgamation. "Dead Cities" embodied a more progressive, yet somehow more danceable sound than the band's past work.
"Accelerator," also a 1996 release, showed the same trend toward even more intensity and pulse.
But seven years is a long time to pick up from where you left off, and the duo of Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans return far, far removed from work past.
"The Isness" is bizarre from both a FSOL and general standpoint. In a way, the band has returned to "Lifeforms"-era earthiness, with samples sounding like they're from a National Geographic special, but without the pulse that characterized "Lifeforms." In its place is a combination of '60s- and '70s-era hippie rock and Eastern-inspired flair, creating a far more psychedelic sound than even the '70s could provide. This is not unlike many of the albums released by progressive artists this year, which makes it surprising to hear from FSOL.
"Lovers," the opener, is a deceitful little track in that it gives little to no indication of what's to follow on the album. Sure, you have the sitar and bongos, but the pulse and rhythm is classic FSOL, although with toned-down intensity, a much funkier guitar harmony line and not quite the innovation we've come to expect.
The ambience of the title track that follows furthers the illusion that we're dealing with a somewhat tweaked version of past work.
Enter "The Mello Hippo Disco Show." The title screams '70s head-trip, and the actual track furthers that scream to a deafening roar. The Pink Floyd influences, circa "Dark Side of the Moon," are more than evident, with even the electronic bleeps and blips taking on an uncomfortably dark and primitive feel. It's entrancing in nearly every sense, with the one exception being the vocals, a conspicuous new addition to Garry Cobain's catalogue -- he both wrote and sings the lyrics.
With vocals recalling Duran Duran and lines like "he's feeling kind of low low / thinks her life is go go / but it's so so slow," the song could certainly do without them, or could at least benefit from better execution. Cobain may be brilliant, but he is not Bob Dylan.
There are brief flashbacks to past work, most notably in "Her Tongue is like a Jellyfish," a haunting, synth-driven experimental piece that strongly recalls aspects of the title track of "Dead Cities," before diverting into an eerie lilt reminiscent of a video game soundtrack a la "Zelda." At just over two and a half minutes, "Jellyfish" is one of the shorter tracks, and its brevity is unfortunate.
For every track reminiscent of past FSOL brilliance, however, there is one like "Go Tell it to the Trees Egghead," a dull, folkish monotony that is all the worse for the fact that it follows one of the album's strongest tracks, "Elysian Feels." "Egghead" is nothing short of hypnotic, but only in the sleep-inducing sense of the word.
After such highly conceptual work in the past, it's hard to get a feel for what "The Isness" attempts to accomplish. Cobain and Dougans, most notably Cobain, clearly have gone to great lengths to reinvent their sound. But the change is so drastic that much of what made FSOL brilliant in the past is overshadowed by the random nature of the album, and the lack of a cohesive theme to tie it all together.
This is not to say that a change is a negative thing for the band. When they emerged onto the scene with "Papua New Guinea" in 1991, the genre was besieged with imitators.
For FSOL to maintain that sound would have made for something trite, while to push already intense and driven tracks upward and onward would have made for an inaccessible headache.
FSOL certainly has been successful in once again shifting into an entirely new paradigm, and the seven years between albums allotted more than adequate time to do so. The gap creates the impression, however, that in executing this particular shift, FSOL leaves some of the best behind.
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