It'd be a shame if history only remembered the Futureheads for one near-perfect album (2004's self-titled debut) and for being unlikely forerunners of the current Kate Bush revival (thanks to that album's heroic "Hounds of Love" cover). But that tricky balance-- between buzzsaw aggression, mathematical complexity, and bubblegum accessibility-- the Sunderland quartet once deftly executed proved difficult to strike on subsequent releases. The result was a more pedestrian, power-pop aesthetic, and, by 2008's This Is Not the World, a band once near the head of the post-millennial post-punk class was threatening to be demoted to one of its also-rans. It's a situation the Futureheads themselves seem all too aware of-- as singer Barry Hyde observes toward the end of their new, fourth album: "The first 5,000 miles/ Are the hardest steps to take/ But then your autopilot/ Kicks in for the journey's sake." Fortunately, with The Chaos, the Futureheads kick the robots out of the captain's deck and switch off the cruise control, resulting in a more accelerated journey marked by more sharp left turns than the group attempted on its past two albums.
But if The Chaos is supposed to represent a hit of the reset button, the Futureheads couldn't have selected a more misleading single than "Heartbeat Song"-- skinny-tied new wave dressed up in modern-rock clothing, landing somewhere between XTC's Drums and Wires and the Warped Tour. Thankfully, it proves to be more an exit point from This Is Not the World's overdriven anthemery than a continuation of it; the rest of The Chaos mostly captures the Futureheads playing to their strength: channelling everyday miseries into manic energy.
The best Futureheads originals ("Decent Days and Nights", "First Day") left you feeling alternately exhilarated and disoriented, abruptly stopping just as you acclimatized yourself to their delirious logic and rhythm. It's a sensation ably approximated here by "Stop the Noise" and "The Connector", the latter a song about electricity that, appropriately, is wound tighter than a magnetic coil, its mechanistic drive routinely jolted by shocks of group harmony. And even when the choruses don't quite deliver the promised payoff (see: the repeated titular hollers of "I Can Do That" and "Sun Goes Down"), the tense verse/bridge build-ups are gratifying.
But if The Chaos marks the point where the Futureheads admit to themselves that the past ain't so bad, closing track "Jupiter"-- clocking in at a career-topping four minutes-- points to an intriguing new direction where the Futureheads apply their eccentricities to lengthier, more conceptual pieces. After all, that first Futureheads album contained so many structural shifts, operatic harmonies, and loopy melodic fragments, it was practically a prog-rock album smashed into two-minute smithereens; "Jupiter" suggests the possibility that the sum could be as great as the parts.
