“you’re old enough to know better… you should be old enough”
The Futureheads are another band that likes to play with their music. There is no overarching structure in their songs. Just when you find a rhythm to pick up on, it disappears. In fact, the music stops and turns in mid-riff so often that it feels like someone smacked the musicians across their faces and they had to regroup. Of course, it also demonstrates how incredibly tight this band plays. It’s like they’re telepathic. Psychopathically telepathic, but together.
The Futureheads are a prime example of why the British still hold bragging rights when it comes to punk. Yes, because it’s 2004, technically this album is postpunk, but it’s more similar to the days of yore (referencing the Clash, Wire, the Gang of Four, Television, XTC, and the Jam—sometimes all in the same song) than any of that American crap we’re producing nowadays and calling punk.
The entire album totals maybe thirty minutes—everything comes at you in a flurry. I’m sure there is a method to their madness, but I don’t really care to find it. It’s a lot more fun just to hold on to the bar and keep your eyes wide open. The Futureheads are going balls-out, switching everything inside a song at the drop of a hat, drooling intensity, screaming desperately and searchingly before shifting to a nice melodic stint because that’s what they wanted to do. Yes, folks, they are out of their minds and having a great time being that way.
The album is rollicking and unexpected. Apart from the wonderful pulsating, pounding, and flickering songs, they throw in the a cappella “Danger of the Water,” which will make skeptics of punk wonder if maybe these guys actually are talented. They, of course, are. And I have to mention “Carnival Kids,” a grotesquely loud, axe-grinding, and pulse-nuclear explosion of a song that reminds you what punk and energy used to sound like.
The vocals are all over the place all over the album. They are assured and delivered rapidly like bullets, in punk shouts, in repetition, and also in melody combinations that would make barbershop quartets scream like Beatles fans. This music is challenging and rambunctious, existential art rock, and gutter rock and roll. The military drumming and cadence pushes the album throughout, except of course when the Futureheads decided they need to change it all up—fast and with authority, the way punk should be.