Welcome to the Forgotten Album Review, where we take the music the world missed out on and bring it to the light! Each week I’ll be reviewing an album by a little-known band, as suggested by Critic readers. The music can be from any genre or location in the space-time continuum, just as long as you believe it to be the Muse’s gift to humanity.
This week’s album is ‘Lifeforms’ by The Future Sound of London, aka FSOL. Blending a wide variety of electronic genres, ‘Lifeforms’ challenges listeners to expand their idea of what music is and can be.
Music: FSOL rarely uses an instrument the way we think they’re supposed to be used. There are no recognizable verses or choruses, little melody, and no true lyrics. Instead, they build soundscapes by adding and subtracting different sounds. The sounds can be just about anything: birds, machinery, water, voices, sound effects, or whatever instrument came to their bizarre minds. In the rare event that something resembling a melody appears, they make sure to leave the listener off-balance with abnormal time signatures or interrupting sounds.
The only thing that’s easy to understand is the percussion. The drumming is very skilled and can occasionally push the tracks into something that can be danced to. Even this is out of the ordinary though, with the type of beating often changing midway to something nonstandard. For example, eggshell, keeps its beat with the sound of a ticking clock.
Feel: The album is great for just sitting back and imagining things. Free of the distraction of lyrics, they often achieve an alien beauty. Many tracks can also serve well as ambient noise.
All the same, I personally wouldn’t leave the album on shuffle if I wasn’t used to it. Some of the tracks sound genuinely creepy and would fit right in as background music for an apocalyptic horror movie. You might want to have it on hand this Halloween.
Variety: Most tracks avoid the mind-numbing repetitiveness that much electronic music suffers from. Their artful technique of adding and dropping different sounds manages to create a feeling of progression and change, rather than hanging stagnantly on one beat. The massive range of sounds does a lot to spice things up.
However, the album is long, weighing in at 90 minutes, and even FSOL’s imagination has limits. Although it’s built as a continuous piece, with only one silent pause and the rest all flowing seamlessly together, I wouldn’t recommend listening to it in one sitting. Also, in my opinion, they overused sci-fi noises and the album would have been better off without so many.
Final Word: If you take the time to understand it, listening to ‘Lifeforms’ will either fascinate you or drive you stark raving mad. In my book, that makes it an experience worth having. Thumbs up!
You can listen to FSOL on YouTube or buy the CD from their website, futuresoundoflondon.com, though it’ll probably give you a seizure.
The Forgotten Album Review needs your help! Send suggestions for next week’s review to the author at justin.golschneider@lsc.vsc.edu.