Jul. 14, 2010 - Issue #769: Musician’s Survival Guide

Future Breeds

Future Breeds
Hot Hot Heat {recordings_bands_mg} Future Breeds {/recordings_bands_mg}
Dine Alone, 2010

After two albums on major label Warner Brothers—through its subsidiary Sire Records—Vancouver-by-way-of-Victoria band Hot Hot Heat was in need of a reboot. Whereas the band's early output stretched the limits of what punk rock could be, its major label efforts seemed to recede into a cocoon of safe structures and diminished tones; the guitars and synths had had their edges dulled and even Steve Bays' characteristic voice took on a more melodic tone instead of the urgent, rabid-rooster crow heard on the band's Sub Pop releases.

The will to return to the band's roots peeked its head out from behind the slick production at times during Hot Hot Heat's major-label forays—a somewhat flatter re-recording of Le Le Low's "5 Times Out of 100" on 2007's Happiness Ltd. Is perhaps the best example—but the fact that Hot Hot Heat was once an entity that pushed the envelope was seemingly forgotten. Future Breeds seeks to recapture the vast amount of frenetic energy that would have been required to propel the band into the public eye from as unlikely a place as Victoria, home to newlyweds and the nearly dead. (As a curious aside, Future Breeds is the first full-length the band has put out that doesn't feature its members on the cover—perhaps another clue that the band intends for this album to be seen as a departure)

In this regard, the album does a passable job. As reboots go, this one is closer to Batman Begins than Ang Lee's Hulk, but while Future Breeds sees the band free to show off some of its harder edges, it lacks focus. Album opener "YVR" feels like a call to arms that sets the album off on the right foot, but the album stumbles on the acoustic tinged second song "21@12" and this pattern continues throughout the rest of the album—moments of brilliance trade off with ones that are somewhat featureless. Whereas a song like "Implosionatic" sounds like a futuristic funeral dirge from outer space—awesome—"Zero Results" meanders aimlessly around a series of uninspired riffs, never quite finding the point or any reason for urgency. "JFK's LSD" begins with a sputtering synth line that sounds like the car you drove in high school coughing itself to life before the song blasts into one of the catchiest hooks on the album, but soon after "Buzinezz as Usual" brings the party down with some rather plain blues piano.

This isn't to suggest that the band should rewrite Make Up the Breakdown over and over—far from it. But where Hot Hot Heat used to excel at making songs that were somewhat dangerous, that straddled the line between the naked aggression of punk, the fey heaving of a crowded dancefloor and bald sexuality, its current reluctance to venture into territory that might make someone uncomfortable castrates its ability to take risks with its music and therefore its ability to make a real impact. V vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus