Strategy's MySpace page bills itself as "the MySpace page for everything Strategy-related," but it doesn't list a genre. Post-rock was indie rockers who didn't want to be indie rockers, it's been said. Avant-rock, a term thrown around more often these days, usually seems like indie rockers who can't really be called indie rockers but debuted at the wrong time to be called post-rock. If you accept that mild oversimplification (and there's $20 in it for you in the future if you do*), then "future rock" is as good a place as any to file the latest release by Paul Dickow, aka Strategy.
On Dickow's second Kranky full-length as Strategy, the Portland, Ore., multi-instrumentalist is a laptop savant who sounds like he wants to be techno, ambient, dub, post-rock, krautrock, shoegaze, and psych-pop all at once. Dickow brings to Future Rock a history of straddling genres, whether with his Community Library electronic label, as one-third of electronically enhanced improv group Nudge, on the keyboard for now-defunct post-rock outfit Fontanelle, or as drummer for the late art-punks Emergency. Retro-futurism has its pleasures, sure, but it's satisfying to hear artists melding genres in search of the real deal, especially when the combination is as exquisitely constructed as it can be here.
Like fellow technophilic dilettante Matthew Dear, Dickow divides his latest album between forward-looking pop songs and atmospheric instrumentals. On Future Rock, even the few songs with words rely on textures as much as tunes to fire up your crystal ball (bong?). "Can't Roll Back" comes out of a staticky fog for looped hand percussion, funky blaxploitation-film guitars, Fender Rhodes improv, and soothing synth sighs. It's the kind of extended rhythmic trip Arthur Russell might have gone on to take, but first, a vocoded mission statement: "You can't go forward/ looking over your shoulder." Through a dubby electronic haze of its own, "Stops Spinning" tries to put the world on pause through sheer force of bass. "Running on Empty" downplays its vocals in favor of tinny beats, photon zaps, and another bass groove. "Red Screen" impressively stacks keyboards, glitchy spoken-word samples, and additional breathy synths up into an electrified holodeck cacophony.
The instrumentals-- and there are fewer of them than you might think on first listen-- imagine an even more broadly encompassing future. Whistling noises over the ambient waves and minimalist beat of the title track briefly bring to mind a Reason-savvy Ennio Morricone-- The Good, the Bad, and the Looks-OK-on-Facebook. The first in a pair of brief "interludes" is as ephemeral as a solar wind, but the second has the wobbly shoegazer pitch-bending of My Blood Valentine or perhaps Seefeel.
The ease with which we can now listen to DJ mixes and mash-ups on the Web, or even just different track juxtapositions on an iPod, has helped inure us to genre barriers-- making this possibly as exciting a time as the years when then-nascent scenes like house, hip-hop, disco, punk, post-punk, and even rock'n'roll or jazz were still in their anything-goes phases, before they quite solidified into genres. At the same time, this album's greatest weakness is that it can occasionally sound unfocused next to more conventional "song" records, while Swedish group Studio's Yearbook 1 is already a looser, more sun-kissed journey into similar space. The genres of tomorrow might not sound like Future Rock, but the exploration is worthwhile, the execution laudable.
