These Are Powers Issue #39

All Aboard Future

By Matthew Siblo
Published: March 1st, 2009 | 3:45pm

While the future isn’t what it used to be, the vision These Are Powers conjure on All Aboard Future would make even the cheeriest optimist recoil in horror. On its Dead Oceans debut, the Brooklyn band has created a set of songs encrusted in thick, caked-on grime. Its sound is a jerky and metallic rhythm, a cacophony of rusty gears creaking and hissing.

The sonic squalor of “Easy Answers’” has the same mechanical stomp Black Dice toyed with on Broken Ear Record, building a melodic backbeat from its clicks, claps, and clacks. Unlike Black Dice’s skuzzy anti-vocals, it’s lead singer Anna Barie’s exaggerated intonation that makes All Aboard Future feel so distinctive, radiating a bravado that offsets the calculated precision of its sterile beats.

The rapid pace of the album halts at “Light After Sound,” a messy electronic dirge that serves as an unofficial segue way into the album’s momentum-killing latter half. It’s an unfortunate development; the songs begin to contract and expand without the addition of any novel or bold sonic textures, leaving its austere and experimental flipside feeling like an afterthought. It is within these songs that Barie’s presence is curiously absent, with bassist Pat Noecker left to take up vocal duties. All Aboard Future rises and falls with the commanding shrillness of Barie’s voice. By “Blue Healer,” the sound collage at album’s end, These Are Powers sounds as if it is treading water and out of ideas.