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RewiReviews.com
January 8, 2002
Future Songs, or the one in which not much happens. But as legions of Seinfeld fans can attest to, it's a brilliant premise. Their seventh studio album finds the Cranes, basically the duo of Jim and Alison Shaw for this record, seaming together a fluid, deceptively minimal circle of songs. There's a new confidence in Alison's vocals and lyrics. Like Liz Fraser, who finally came clean on the last two Cocteau Twins albums, bits of Future Songs are fully intelligible, and lyrics are even printed for the first time to help you along.
So what if Alison doesn't bother to finish a sentence half the time and she still sings like the funny little exorcist lady from Poltergeist? The appeal has always been the stark contrast of her strange wispy, childlike voice against a hypnotic primal drum beat and equally entrancing loops of guitar. 'Future Song' is a premeditated, late-night murder in an Italian subway, 'Submarine' is the spiraling conscience of a child vampire, and ‘Sunrise' is stripped-down elegiac British gospel as big in heart as Spiritualized's 'Stop Your Crying'. But all roads lead to the album's most fully realised songs, 'Driving In The Sun' and 'The Maker Of Heavenly Trousers', two blissful moments of clarity. Future Songs is the Cranes' Pygmalion, an album which seemed like a disaster for Slowdive at the time, the band dissolving shortly afterwards, but in retrospect signaled a new direction for the future of music. And the future is here. 8.
Reviewed by SFenn
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