As much as listeners strive to seek out and reward bands that are truly original, there's a sense that complaining about derivative music is an ultimately futile affair, on par with doing the same about traffic, exorbitant athlete salaries, or primetime sitcoms: it's something of a victimless crime that's impossible to realistically eliminate, so you might as well learn to deal. On that note, Suuns' Images Du Futur is indeed a derivative record, but in a paradoxically unique way that doesn't allow the typical mitigating circumstances to be considered. The Montreal band doesn't recall a specific era of music, nor do they remind one of the kind of band so ingrained in the culture that they're basically public domain. This is something far more weird: on their debut Zeroes QC, Suuns occasionally sounded like Clinic, a band that is still functioning and wholly idiosyncratic, in between extended bouts of electronic, psych-prog freakouts. But here they sound like that band and that band only to the point where it's a protracted game of chicken with the audience-- or Suuns have actually never heard Clinic before in their lives. Otherwise, how could they not notice?
And yet, Suuns can never mount the best possible defense to accusations of theft: to add something new to it and prove they're refracting their influences through their own ideals and experience rather than just filtering. As a result, nearly every song on Images Du Futur feels like a bin of used CDs or an mp3 folder rather than a living thing, something to peruse rather than engage. Whether it's the rather not-magnificent "Holocene City" or the dreary "Edie's Dream", Suuns sound cold when they mean to sound cool, channeling music obsessed with motion but more or less running in place themselves.
Likewise, Shemie doesn't do much to let you in; beyond his half-mutter, half-hiss vocals evoking pitch-perfect Ade Blackburn karaoke, whenever he repeats sentence fragments as a way of sounding urgent, it just sounds like tossing of flavorless word salad, overly plainspoken and cryptic at the same time. You wonder about the message being conveyed by bullishly-titled closer "Music Won't Save You" and it just feels like an unintentionally apropos eulogy for a record that disappoints by geeking out over its record collection and effects pedals without offering some kind of emotional center. Pretty much any way you slice it, Images Du Futur is just too clinical.
