There's No Padding Like American Idol Padding

The female section of Pontiac Dream is currently watching hour number 5 of the lingering death of American Idol's latest season. Queen Latifah has kindly taken time out from making the worst films in Hollywood to scare the audience with stretchy black pants.

So I have put on my headphones and although I can still Paula Abdul read from her thesaurus, my music acts as an effective kind of Maginot Line.

And I'm listening to The Future Will Come, the new album from The Juan Maclean. TJM, as I will call them in an effort to appear in a zeitgeist, are from the DFA stable. John MacLean, who essentially is TJM and James Murphy used to be in the same group and it was Murphy who brought Maclean back to music and its electronic possibilities. Yeah, I read the wikipedia site, want to fight??

I picked up TJM's first album, Less Than Human, on the back of hearing a few tracks on a DFA comp and a general obsession with the disco-punk-funk ethos represented by the lable. Less Than Human was a mostly minimal techno with touches of dancefloor motions. A soundtrack to the first date between two 23rd Century androids.

So I was excited about the recent release of The Future Will Come. The surprise was that rather than another journey to the stripped down electric side of DFA, the two androids have built themselves a time machine and are having a honeymoon in a parallel universe to 1982.

edit point: the metaphor has gone too far I know, but in my defence my musical critique professors were all Muzik magazines writers like Calvin Bush and Ben Turner. And they used metaphors with military precision. Respect.

So anyhoo...The Future Will Come has an eighties pop feel while hinting at the House boom waiting fround the corner. LCD Soundsystem keyboardist/synth destroyer, Nacy Whang, has joined MacLean as a vocalist and there duets are a mix alienation and curiosity.

So far I I still prefer the first album. It was my techno treat for a long time and the new tracks are still finding their way under my skin. Some of the lyrics are nonsense but at points it becomes very danceable and a couple of tracks are classic DFA statements: punktinged lyrics, disco electrics, funk basslines.

Check it out and wet your beak with these tracks.

The Juan MacLean - The Simple Life

The Juan MacLean - A New Bot