If you play in a band that sounds like the Beatles with Harrison as your surname, you know destiny's been fiddling with a few too many knobs. But in the case of Austin-based Future Clouds & Radar, songwriter and former Cotton Mather frontman Robert Harrison's art rock is so compellingly embellished with psychedelic tinges and pop swirls that the urge to spot reference points soon falls away. Peoria, the band's follow-up to their sprawling self-titled debut, craftily pits hold-your-hand pop against more shadowy terrain within its half-hour lifespan, resulting in a record that stands easily on its own merits.
Peoria's pearls aren't hard to find. Once your ears stop sifting through the songs looking for Sgt. Pepper's and White Album nods, you'll also stop noticing Harrison's oddly Lennonesque vocals (this despite hailing from Texas) or benign similarities like the "Across the Universe" melody that ekes its way into "Mummified". If Lennon's accusation of McCartney was that he was "pizza and fairytales," then Future Clouds & Radar are warm laundry and machetes. Indeed, Peoria is so pleasant to wrap yourself in, it's easy to miss the darker elements, like the "Found a mockingbird/ And I drowned it" couplet in "Old Edmund Ruffin". Just keep the blackbird away from Old Edmund's fish tank.
Future Clouds & Radar lopped off a lot of extra fat between their double-disc debut and Peoria's eight tracks, and the leaner profile is a much better look. But even within this tighter framework, they've left room for instrumental and textural variety. Opener and single "The Epcot View" starts off innocently enough with a balmy drum machine that dissolves behind its earnest melody. The two-minute piano-driven "Feet on Grass" pinches the album with an orchestral belt, then drifts into the dreamy "Mummified", which strays into seven-minute territory with Hollie Thomas' schizophrenic key tapping. In case you hadn't noticed the death themes by this point, the band kindly reminds you with "The Mortal" and "Mortal 926". The first pauses the 1960s filters to break down into a Flaming Lips jam mid-song, and the industrial instrumental "Mortal 926" could easily double as a detective show theme song with mounting brass and unresolved bass line. The brevity of some tracks and the rambling jams in others are-- surprisingly-- complementary, melding Future Clouds & Radar's moments down Willy Wonka's scary tunnel with a more traditional tour.
The band's only missteps occur in the last track, "Follow the Crane", which has a few extraneous sound effects-- dog barks, sirens-- that come off like an overly busy holdover from their debut. These moments aside, it's an otherwise solid wrap-up of Peoria's sinister ends. I've always resented being fooled into an extra glance or two in my rearview mirrors. But here at the record's close, Thomas' keyboard floats like it would in a movie when the protagonist moves into a big house and swears she heard music coming from the cobwebbed upstairs. For a few moments, a fairy tale emerges and fades, there's a nice melodic coda, and the curtain falls on the album's dreamy run. Peoria is smart, carefully crafted, and loads more efficient than Future Clouds' debut, suggesting that there's a lot to look forward to in the band's next episode.
