If you wanted to hear an askew semi-counterpoint to Hercules and Love Affair's longing, unrequited "Blind" last year, all you had to do was jump back a couple of weeks and one DFA catalogue number. The Juan MacLean's "Happy House" might have been comparatively overlooked in the wake of their labelmates' widespread critical success, but it's hard not to hear it as the weight on the other side of the scale. It jumps a decade or so past H&LA's Larry Levan-minded disco into a style alluded to in the song's double-meaning title, Nancy Whang's voice dripping with a cool, almost aloof exuberance that seemed content to ride along with that pulse-raising piano. It figures that its biggest refrain and most memorable line hints at an arch sort of romanticism: "you are so... excellent." Yet "Happy House" is a stylistic fluke in a discography that got rolling with the jagged yet warm electro-house of the 2002 single "By the Time I Get to Venus" and aimed upwards with 2005's Less Than Human. With more than a year to build on the goodwill accumulated by a potential career-changer, the Juan MacLean have already gone in a completely different direction on their new album.
The Future Will Come does at least aim to join "Happy House" in its lean towards pop-music structure, even if it gets there through an era-spanning synth-pop pastiche rather than the euphoria of late-80s (and early 00s revival) house. That shouldn't be too out-of-nowhere, especially if you've already been primed by "The Simple Life", which followed "Happy House" in single form late last summer and points towards the Human League-gone-disco sound John MacLean hinted at during interviews in the run-up to this album. But that song, a gradually-building, subtly-mutating piece of Moroder-meets-Yaz(oo) that spans over eight and a half minutes in opening the album, is a red herring in its own way. That's because with the exception of the 10-minute "Tonight", which blends dubby T.K. Disco rhythm with Derrick May bass in the service of a song filled with strangely mournful-sounding anticipation, every track on The Future Will Come that hasn't already appeared as a single last year is a relatively short and succinct piece of work; think a bunch of radio edits instead of the 12" mixes.
The good news is that brevity keeps some of these tracks from getting stretched thin: The rubbery bongo-driven percussion and mutating, unraveling synths in the title track sound like they reach peak powers just before the song ends a few seconds shy of the five-minute mark, the midtempo electro-funk of "Accusations" fits in enough ebb-and-flow atmosphere to explore its Balearic-tweaking turf thoroughly, and cuts like "A New Bot" and "The Station" bypass gradual-build club dynamics entirely to focus on straightforward post-new-wave hookiness, whether it's frenetically anxious or brooding respectively. Yet a couple of other songs feel rudely truncated before they can build to the bigger, arm-waving moments that seem just over the horizon. The seething acid-house of "No Time", which sounds like the Human League's "Being Boiled" on heavy stimulants, ends too quickly, but it stings particularly hard when the 81-meets-89 rave-pop of "One Day" simply drops off a cliff after just more than four minutes when it sounds like it should go on for another six. Like most quality DFA full-lengths, this album has post-disco dance-pop aesthetics intersecting and merging in ways that transcend cheap retro; too much of it leaves you wondering if it could've gone even further with a bit more breathing room.
Still, what could another four minutes here and there really do about the dour mood? That's the other gag The Future Will Come springs on the unsuspecting listener hoping for an hour's worth of "Happy House" giddiness, with Whang and MacLean sniping at each other in character like the Oakey/Sulley dynamic in "Don't You Want Me" pushed to a barely repressed loathing. It makes sense, since their vocals are incompatible with each other in the most basic respect. Whang is all coquettish detachment and reserved emotion, singing as though she just happens to be pretty good at expressing these feelings (but, y'know, not showing off or anything), while MacLean stretches his flat voice into attempted overenunciations and hiccupy quirkiness that are beyond the ability of his ideally-monotone voice.
As they sing with clashing voices about how hard it is to get along with anyone, this is ebullient, frequently exciting music that trades on the concept of love as irritating farce. The first verse on "The Simple Life" opens with the Whang-sung couplet "Promises you gave but never kept/ Apologies to save for last regrets"; "One Day" sees both singers trading embittered breakup barbs with the promise that "I'll tell you what you wanna hear if you try" the closest it gets to reconciliation; "No Time" drains all the empathy out of post-one-night stand ennui and brings out the casual cruelty in the typically-innocuous pop-lyric standby "shut your mouth." It's all a bit exhausting, but it does lead to a knockout bit of sequencing: from the sourly regretful back-and-forth relationship burden complaints of "The Station" to the sparse, false-ending-filled, self-pitying solo-piano dirge of "Human Disaster"-- and then, to finish the album, "Happy House" in its complete 12-and-a-half minutes of ecstasy. That single hardly represents how the rest of the album turned out sounding, but you couldn't pick a better flash of light at the end of the tunnel.
