Title:A Difficult Future By: The Timeout Drawer Released by: someoddpilot records Released on: 2001 Rating (out of 10): 2 Date: 07/05/2002
Please Tell Me This Isn't the Future!
A year after their debut album, Record Of Small Histories, The Timeout Drawer's sophomore effort, A Difficult Future, was released. A couple of things became clear immediately: First, The Timeout Drawer doesn't want vocals; they are by nature an instrumental quartet. Second, the success of their first record gave them the chance to do things their way the next time around.
The changes between the two albums are striking, though it's obviously the same band. A Difficult Future is, even beyond the lack of vocals, a completely synthesized sound; combining jazzy riffs, moogs crawling everywhere, and some oddball rock 'n' roll, it's all perfectly written and performed...too perfect. If there are humans connected to this production in any fashion, it's not proven by the sound, which comes off like the domestic lives of computers.
It's difficult to have an opinion of something as sterile as A Difficult Future. The sound ebbs and flows, occasionally blaring as a (synthesized) horn dances around the elevator music. That blaring is the only surprising part of the album; most of this goes in one ear and out the other, leaving no trace that it was ever there. Is this mood music? If it is, all I can say is that The Timeout Drawer have a seriously depressed moog. No, wait computers don't have moods.
It's fascinating that humans can coax music out of computers; it's unnatural, though the results are sometimes very beautiful. The important part is "human," which seems to have been forgotten with A Difficult Future. Even the earliest computer hit, "Buttered Popcorn," gave the impression that there was someone making the computer play the music, that a human's mind and heart was behind the sound. The Timeout Drawer seem to have put their fancy equipment on autopilot and let it do whatever it wished (hang on computers don't wish), creating precise, perfect, and utterly empty music fit only for other computers to listen to.
Is it just that it's all instrumental? The heavy-duty electronics? Not really; those aren't damning qualities. What is damning is the complete lack of soul here, the sense that I, the least musically talented person on Earth could create this album if somebody taught me the programming codes. There's no magic here, no music made by and for people...and that's supposed to be the point, isn't it?
