Judging by Her Space Holiday sad guy Marc Bianchi's latest, the meeting of past, present, and future must sound like heart-choked whispers, stuttering electronic beats, and chopped orchestral do-do-dos. In other words, fifth proper full-length The Past Presents the Future is not much different from Her Space Holiday albums past-- and despite the promised future, the damn thing only plays in the present.
OK, so it's a little different. Along with his familiar first-person woe-is-mes, Bianchi lends his flat Oberstian vox and sample-stocked laptop to several third-person tales. That means "The Weight of the World" isn't about the narrator's attempted suicide, but that of a disillusioned religious woman ("Rip those black beads off your throat/ Swap 'em out for a knotted rope"). Elegantly string-encrusted "You and Me" casts Bianchi as a shoulder to cry on, wondering "how can so much good exist in such a tiny heart?" rather than starring in his own romantic tragedy. Then there's "A Match Made in Texas", about a gender-bending couple ("He likes wearing her clothes/ She likes watching him dress"). The apparent setting-- Texas, whoa!-- may help the song's flaccid politics, but can't save a monotonous melody.
On 2003's The Young Machines, stellar tracks like "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend" and "Sleepy California" made up for the rest. Here, unfortunately, the balance is reversed. Of Bianchi's missteps, the gravest are his efforts to harness catchy songs past for his present, ah, future. A bass line and "1, 2, 3" chorus straight from the Jackson 5 are boppily out of place on "Missed Medicine", with its bitter call to "exploit our misery." Then there's the all-time lamest Beatles reference in the history of lame Beatles references: "Here comes your son/ Do, do, do, do/ Here comes your son/ He isn't all right," from "The Great Parade". And those songs are merely the obvious offenders.
Checking phone messages is a chore, but Bianchi makes us listen to his twice. A friend's spoken "Marc, you're leaving" opens the album-- and, duh, scares the shit out of me, 'cause I drink too many espressos. On "A Small Setback to a Great Comeback", high-pitched ambient drones accompany an increasingly pathetic woman's voice ("I wish you were here just to hold me," yuck, cooties!). By the predictable acoustic finale, Bianchi wants to hold his family, too. Aww. "Regret is like a bill unpaid/ It controls your every move," he adds, but I don't know what that means. My unpaid bills just pile up, silently cursing their puppeteering ineptitude.
Bianchi's not much for such subtleties, emotional or rhetorical, which may suggest he'll have as much lovelorn electro-symphonic melodrama to recount on future albums as on those past and present-- unless of course time is just an illusion, in which case at least you haven't wasted any.
