The Future Will Come by The Juan MacLean
LABEL: DFA Records

"...an edginess that is as socio-culturally specific as it is resonant with the average Joe in these trying times—gradually emerges as the album’s enduring leitmotif..."

Over the past two decades, restless musician John MacLean has drifted between cities, nations and genres. In the nineties, his seminal work with Providence-based indie mainstays Six Finger Satellite—arguably the Velvet Underground of their era—set the tenor for the incipient clangor of the post-punk revival. When all-but-promised stardom failed to materialize, he succumbed to the usual hubris of substance abuse.

After mustering the strength to conquer his addictions and move on with his life, MacLean was working as a high school English teacher in New Hampshire when an old friend—LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, who had built his reputation as Six Finger Satellite’s soundman—emerged as an unlikely benefactor. Eventually cajoling his friend to move south, MacLean has never looked back as leader of The Juan MacLean, eking out a formidable niche in the Brooklyn/New York dance scene. Yet even as Murphy’s musical bricolage manages to infiltrate the Top 40 and DFA Records labelmates Hercules & Love Affair elicit more than enough press in their own right these days, MacLean has cultivated a persona that teeters upon the Dylanesquely numinous. He’s also quite unprolific a la the old school—an inkling, perhaps, of his acute understanding of the business.

As such, MacLean’s 2005 debut (or, more accurately, rediscovery)—the iceberg-aloof, thoroughly automatonic Less Than Human—laid down a austere dance floor polemic that was every bit as galvanizing as This Side of Paradise was for prose ninety years ago. Within months, reverberations of “Tito’s Way” and “Dance With Me” echoed, however commodified, in a new wave of rock/dance auteurs such as MSTRKRFT. Once again, MacLean had moved a mere paucity of records, but his influence stretched from Williamsburg to Shibuya.

Which leads us to the malaise of 2009, where solipsistic third-wave noise rock bands are all the rage (with this critic partially to blame), chopped-up disco samples perambulate into the ears through tinnitus-inducing sound systems at clubs in fashionable nabes as “the new thing,” and perfectly decent records—think PJ Harvey’s recent A Woman a Man Walked By—face unwarranted castigation for their flashes of genre-hopping filigree. Out of this abyss comes MacLean with his sophomore release, The Future Will Come, and the message is mordantly clear.

“After years of evoking—never invoking, thank heavens—the past in various permutations, MacLean and the DFA have touched down in the present. And it isn’t pretty.”

“I was walking home feeling so dejected about my desires,” MacLean muses on the brief “One Day” (a relatively straightforward tip of the hat to acid house, albeit filtered through the male/female counterpoint aesthetic of the Human League), and this edginess—an edginess that is as socio-culturally specific as it is resonant with the average Joe in these trying times—gradually emerges as the album’s enduring leitmotif. “Accusations” and “Human Disaster,” like the recent novels of cyberpunk sage William Gibson, portray a dystopian “future” that is also startlingly contemporary, submerged in eerie synth beats and simple verse/chorus/verse structures. After years of evoking—never invoking, thank heavens—the past in various permutations, MacLean and the DFA have touched down in the present. And it isn’t pretty.

Much of the album’s success can be ascribed to unlikely dance floor star Nancy Wang, late of LCD Soundsystem’s touring band and Soulwax’s “NY Excuse”. Though hardly in the league of vintage divas Gwen Guthrie (“Ain’t Nothing Going on but the Rent”) or Grace Jones, Wang’s plaintive style makes her a spectral Emmylou Harris to MacLean’s weathered Gram Parsons. On “The Simple Life,” within walking distance of being the most bemusing track in the collection, Wang adds a dollop of much-needed soul to an unremarkable Eurodisco jam buoyed by MacLean’s sociopathic narrative of 21st Century love gone awry. And on “Happy House”—the 2008 club hit that rounds out this collection—she expiates the sins of the present in the argot of a mystic, launching listeners well into the cosmos.

Whether producers, listeners, and dancers will follow that mandate is, naturally, anyone’s guess.

REVIEWED BY SEAN MURPHY
SEAN'S FAVORITE TRACKS: "Happy House" • "Accusations" • "No Time"
Read more by Sean Murphy on his blog, Brooklyn Music

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