How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident, Future of the Left's fourth studio album, is built on political, pugilistic rage: The guitars hack and slash while the bass and drums pummel over every lyric. The thing that'll gall most Lefties is that this album is all but absent of synths, which lends an unrelenting aggression. This isn't an new move; although their last record had a handful of great keyboard moments—the glitchy noise of "Failed Olympic Bid", the electronic blasts of "Polymers Are Forever"—Future of the Left have been steadily moving away from the "synth" part of synth-punk for years now, refining the menace of the guitar/bass/drums setup. Apart from the acoustic reprieve on "French Lessons" or the gothic-country of "Why Aren't I Going to Hell?", How to Stop Your Brain is like a flurry of damning punches bludgeoning your face. It's their toughest, meatiest record to date.
Future of the Left's constant is Falco's voice, sung in an impish sneer, casting himself as the mischievous Puckish figure, the only one who knows what's really goin' on, though you are never sure what's sincere and what's sarcastic. Wit has always been part of Future of the Left's appeal, but it's also the kind of distancing sneer of someone you've always wanted to impress, but on some level, know you never will. The sneer of the smartest guy in the room.
Here, that humor is very much intact. On "Singing of the Bonesaws", Falco's vocal twists into the voice of a 1960s BBC newsreader, matter-of-factly reporting the decay of civilisation as if reporting the weather. Reportedly it was written in the span of a lunch-break and it sounds as much, playing out like a lucid stream-of-consciousness diatribe over a simple rhythm that shames just about everyone. But once it's beaten you into submission, you begin to feel capable of throwing a few punches of your own, and How to Stop Your Brain offers up one hell of a hit list: record companies, the music industry hype machine, the pedos who run the BBC and sleazy, aging DJs.
If the album has a coherent theme, it's laid out in the opening track: "I'm just a man/ A simple thing." The album has something to say about what it means to be masculine in 2013, and boy, men do not come off looking great. On "Donny of the Decks", the bruised meat of the issue is churned through the grinder of a slimy radio DJ well past his prime. Elsewhere, "The Male Gaze" asks "The passing train has left me behind/ If you turn into an object on the second night/ Will my eyes get used to it? / Will your heart compete with it?/ After failure." To talk about sex in these primitive ways—hunter and hunted, conquest and conquered—it's all so barbaric, but to deal with all the sex on here, you have to approach it on its own level.
The album never really judges. Instead, it draws pathetic portraits of these sex-crazed worms and allows them to condemn themselves with their descent into sexual irrelevance. It's a particularly skilful form of torture and one Future of the Left do with frustrating regularity. They've all the trappings of a Band Who Could Be Your Life, from the name to their defiant energy to the state-of-affairs type lyrics. But their songs provide no model for a better society, no scripture, and no guilty verdict. Even "She Gets Passed Around at Parties", a fairly straightforward story mirroring that 37-dicks scene from Clerks in which an insecure guy has to deal with his loved one's former promiscuity, doesn't make a call either way. Instead, Future of the Left know that we're all our own worst enemies, the most elegant engineers of our own miserable downfall, because we're the only ones who know how pathetic we truly are.
For however much of the album concerns itself with the festering axe wounds of our society and the confused lunks trying to crawl their way into 'em, it also doubles down on Future of the Left's trademark firebomb-throwing brutality. It's nasty and explosive and full of bile, a hard rockin' bare-knuckle blow to the temple that'll lay you flat out. In other words, How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident is just the thing for the modern man, those confused and angrily impotent brutes.
