Robert Harrison formed Future Clouds & Radar after the break-up of his former group, garage-pop hopefuls Cotton Mather, but it was a serious spinal injury that he says led to his new band's self-titled, self-released debut. He wrote from his bed for two years, then recorded and played with a revolving roster of Austin musicians. At 27 tracks covering a range of styles and sounds, Future Clouds & Radar is predictably ambitious, overlong, and aggressive in its eagerness to impress. Like almost all double albums, it provokes the phrase "needs an editor." But this exaggerated scope makes a certain kind of sense: in a large scene clogged with new bands and big statements, selling yourself as a pop genius through this sort of monument to indie hubris at least gets you noticed.
And it just might work: already this debut has earned praise for its scope and has garnered comparisons to The White Album, among other doubles. Certainly the Beatles are Robert Harrison's primary frame of reference-- along with artists like George Harrison, John Lennon, and Wings-- but Future Clouds & Radar is not the sort of interesting mess that The White Album was. Of course, there is so much material here that it inevitably hits all the marks: from wholly unlistenable ("Doctor No") and bafflingly bad ("Cowboy Weather") to decent enough ("Let Me Get Your Coat") and actually really good ("Build Havana"). But even at its best, there's no connective tissue between these songs, no overarching theme or consistency of quality to justify its immodest length.
Harrison's everything-and-the-kitchen-sink production doesn't help, either. These songs are busy with sound, as if intended for a hyperactive child: in addition to the standard pop instruments, there are crickets, chimes, sitars, drones, static, ghostly background voices, errant beats, and floating samples of significant dialogue, as well as unidentifiable clicks, chirps, whirs, loops, bings, blips, pings, pongs, bells, and whistles. Such excess, however, does not denote originality or excitement in this case: despite Harrison's best efforts to cram these songs to bursting with so many Technicolor sounds, these two discs are relentlessly beige-- pop without any power, psychedelia rendered as easy listening. On songs like "Malice of Stars" and the cover of Bob Marley's "Wake Up and Live", the supersaturated production drowns the melodies in noise, distracting you from the songs' core. Elsewhere, it tugs the songs earthward, making them sound leaden and often annoyingly choppy.
Worst of all, a certain smugness rules these proceedings-- the same kind that makes us scoff at baby-boomer blues rockers like Eric Clapton and makes hardcore Beatles fans largely unbearable. Future Clouds & Radar gives the sense that Robert Harrison and his band make music with the conviction that their influences-- their idols-- are critically unassailable and that perhaps they are similarly unassailable by association. But no artist is merely the sum of his or her influences. It's not who you listen to that matters, but what you do with what you've heard. Future Clouds & Radar do way too much, but not nearly enough.
