Travels With Myself and Another
Travels With Myself and Another would’ve been a contender for album of the year based on song titles alone: “Stand By Your Manatee,” “The Hope That House Built,” “Drink Nike,” “I Am Civil Service,” “Yin/Post-Yin,” “You Need Satan More Than He Needs You.” Lyrically, Future of the Left mostly follow the same general pattern. Across his band’s incredible second album, Andy Falkous, formerly of McLusky, hurtles half a billion non-sequiturs, aphorisms, and absurdist punch-lines (“Come on, Rick/ I’m not a rope/ Now pull your socks up.”) For Falkous, most of the pleasure in having a grammar jones comes in the ability to get things gloriously wrong; he’s like Zack de la Rocha with 100% less earnestness and 100% more transpositional puns. Yet, somewhere in the thick of Travels With Myself and Another, Falkous has also hidden a concept album about choosing sides between God and the devil—one of them sure is travelling with him, and which one it is may or may not surprise you.
Of course, Falkous is merely the window-dressing that gets you into the store. This may be his best album since McLusky Do Dallas, but if drummer Jack Egglestone and bassist Kevin Mathias hadn’t helped him ditch McLusky’s Pixies-indebted angular rock for something profoundly weirder, Travels With Myself and Another would have likely met with a wall of late-period They Might Be Giants-style indifference. Egglestone and Mathias churn out rhythms that couldn’t even remotely be considered cool, that could maybe be considered edgy, if only for their deeply rooted goony-ness. Handclaps and danceable downbeats buoy the second half of “Stand By Your Manatee;” “That Damned Fly” rests on a math-rock riff that very obviously plays one part of the equation wrong. On the album opener and closer, highlights “Arming Eritrea” and “Lapsed Catholics,” Future of the Left hint at the Pinback-like indie rock they could have easily chosen to record. Instead, they channel 80’s hardcore, but in the sense that 80’s hardcore was secretly a social awkward genre crafted out of elbows.
The rhythmic foundation also provides an opportunity for some of the best melodies of Falkous’ career, as his tirades often blossom into hooks, and those hooks often blossom into bigger, poppier hooks—which is not something you’d exactly expect from a band who has pinned its persona on a dude with lyrical Tourette’s. Sure, there are plenty of places where Falkous’ lyrical tirades don’t quite mesh with his singing, and all of it clashes with the herky-jerky rhythms. But Travels With Myself and Another’s occasional lack of cohesiveness may be the best indicator that Future of the Left is headed toward something even greater.
-Martin Brown, 2009
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