Album review: Future of the Left: 'Travels with Myself and Another'

FUTURE OF THE LEFT: 'Travels with Myself and Another' (4AD)

Jack Egglestone is an angry man. Quite what he’s angry about, however, is anyone’s guess. The latest batch of aggressive, scuzzy noise rock to come out of the Future of the Left camp is as deliciously oblique and frustratingly nonsensical as always; traversing a minefield of guttural rants without really explaining just what on Earth’s got the boys so incredibly riled. Listening to ‘Travels with Myself and Another’ is sort of like wandering into a blistering domestic row halfway through, and not knowing anything about any of the parties involved. The lyrics are replete with didactic, accusatory exclamations, often directed at specific individuals (the stingingly pinpointed Nick of ‘Arming Eritrea’, ‘Throwing Bricks at Trains’’ Reginald J. Trucksfield) and contain frankly bizarre concepts: ‘Drink Nike’? You what? ‘He’s one of a kind/He’s got chin music’? Excuse me? Would someone mind explaining to me just what the fudge is going on?

Of course, we wouldn’t really want them to. Part of the delectable fun of listening to a Future of the Left record is the chance to lose yourself in absurdity, to wallow in a quagmire of unqualified frustration without needing to find some sort of empathetic connection to the lyrics. It certainly helps that each track is a purely visceral slice of white hot musical dissonance, the perfect soundtrack for Egglestone’s anger. The guitars are distorted, uncontrolled and messy, gloriously bereft of the polish that usually characterises such genre staples. And then there’s the ace up their sleeve – the casually interspersed keyboard parts, which amplify the intensity of the tracks and produce some of the album’s most wickedly addictive moments.

Oh sure, there’s unquestionable genius in the more straightforward guitar/bass/drums set-up – ‘Arming Eritrea’ is a fantastic rollercoaster of cacophonous noise, threatening to unravel at any moment, and ‘The Hope that House Built’ is the year’s most ridiculously catchy non-pop song – but just check out that rolling piano/Casio combination in ‘Yin/Post-Yin’, or, even better, all two minutes forty three seconds of ‘You Need Satan More Than He Needs You’, a song so evil, you feel sinful just pressing play. The lyrics are dodgy enough (‘what kind of orgy leaves a sense of deeper love?’/’Clean up, fetch the goat!’ etc.) but it’s the bleak keyboard underscore that makes the track, accentuating its fiendishness. And then Egglestone opines that ‘it doesn’t smell like a man/It doesn’t taste like a man' and asks, ‘but does it fuck like a man?’, and the listener’s complete devotion to his peculiar brand of preaching is complete. This is what rock music is all about; hell, this is what rock music was made for.

‘Travels with Myself and Another’ is a stunningly ridiculous, utterly bizarre record that manages to avoid completely confusing the listener by simply rocking like one hell of a bastard. Within the space of thirty five blistering minutes, Future of the Left effectively spunk all over your poor, unsuspecting stereo and you will love every dirty, thrilling, exciting and beguiling minute of it. Freaking orgasmic. (9/10)