Timber Timbre’s music has
always traced a shadowed path, using cues of the past to fuse the sound of a
distant, haunted now. On its fourth record – Sincerely, Future Pollution – Timber Timbre coats the stark, sensual
sound of 2014’s Hot Dreams in an
oil-black rainbow of municipal grime. It is the cinema of a dizzying dystopia, rattled
by the science fiction of this bluntly nonfictional time.
The first single – “Sewer
Blues” – is an ironclad groove marked by plodding, heavy rhythm, cavernous
delay, and a backdrop of starry synthesizers. Taylor Kirk’s nearly spoken words
seem to emit from the underbelly of urban decay, carried on the ominous air of these
troubled days. The scene is set with the long cold tones of album starter
“Velvet Glove & Spit”, and Kirk’s warm but mournful opening lines: I could not release the inspiration until
you asked me to / Came at your body relentlessly throughout the year.
“2016 was a very difficult
time to observe,” Kirk says. “I hate to admit that normally I express more
sensitivity than concern politically, but I think the tone and result on the
record is utter chaos and confusion. When we were recording, the premonition
was that the events we saw unfolding were an elaborate hoax. But the mockery
made of our power system spawned a lot of dark, dystopic thoughts and ideas.
And then it all happened, while everyone was on Instagram. The sewers
overflowed.”
Sincerely, Future Pollution stands out in Timber Timbre’s catalogue of imagistic records,
with Kirk and band-mates Mathieu Charbonneau and Simon Trottier taking a unique
approach to Timber Timbre’s process of sonic invention. Kirk wrote the songs in
late 2015/early 2016, then arranged the music over a “very focused” Montreal winter
with the veteran Timber Timbre members. Kirk explains how Charbonneau and
Trottier came to play more integral roles in the realization of Sincerely, Future Pollution, articulating
the songs’ urgency with an unexpected palette:
“My solitary sketching was
left more rudimentary than in the past,” Kirk says. “The prior records, I’d
decided what they were going to sound like. I’d imagined the arrangements when
the songs were sketched. Down to anomalous sounds. There was a vision that was
manageable somehow. This album was much less focused that way, but far more
complex. It was complicated and challenging to the end, every detail seeming
somehow counterintuitive.”
For the recording, the trio –
armed with “secret weapon” Olivier Fairfield on drums – travelled to La Frette
chateau outside Paris, where they looked to the studio’s array of archetypal
synthesizers for the flesh of the songs. Be it the freedom of recording abroad,
or the revelation of these unexplored instruments, Timber Timbre found a
release from artistic constriction and created its most daring work yet.
Perhaps for the first time, Timber
Timbre indulged its alleged “decade drift” – from the self-titled record’s 50s
doo-wop, to Creep On Creepin On’s oblique
60s folk, and Hot Dreams’ 70s caprice
– allowing the tools to personify the songs. A blend of the album’s
mid-apocalyptic setting and its idyllic recording, Sincerely, Future Pollution is a romance of neoteric machines and dark,
futuristic hues: with promise as beautiful as it is unsettling.
“None of us are massive
fans of electronic and pop music, but certainly there are touchstones that most
of us agree upon,” Kirk says of the album’s influences. “I had a desire to stretch forward somehow in terms of genre and
move beyond things that sound classic, to move beyond the idea of satisfying my own idea of
‘good taste’. If the other records had such an emphasis on melding soft warm
tones, I wanted Sincerely, Future
Pollution to be steely and cool. Colder and starker sonically.”
The result is a newfangled
sound with the plastic, cinematic tint of 80s avarice. “Grifting” struts,
literally grifts, a deep, synthetic funk, with brash determination never before
heard in Timber Timbre’s earthy catalogue. Kirk’s lyrics, in his unmistakably chilling
croon, show a palate for the acridity of crime – Pulling off a fast one / Riffing off the last one / Reeling in the big
one / Fished-in fished-in / Grifting Grifting Grifting – before pivoting into
the gilded chorus of a haloed, Hollywood bedroom scene.
“Moment” glints with dazzling
synthesizers – hiding heartbreak with the mastery of Nick Cave’s most elegant
dirges – before devolving into a fray of shredded guitar. The title track
growls with low-end urgency then combusts in a cloud of chiming sequencers. “Western
Questions” lurks like the exotic, deserted remnants of Hot Dreams’ “Grand Canyon,” while “Bleu Night” is electrified with
vocoder verses and the poltergeist of seven billion handheld devices.
If each Timber Timbre record is
framed in genre play, on Sincerely,
Future Pollution, the components are the most askew: the glam of Roxy
Music; the plaintive pop of Talk Talk; the disquiet of Suicide; the invincibility
of Talking Heads; the haunting This Mortal Coil. All (and more) unlikely
references are present, tethering Timber Timbre’s experimentation to points of familiarity.
The range is an acute angle from New Age to Popular French Disco Revival like
Daft Punk and Air, filtered through Timber Timbre’s painterly imagination. Freshly
exhumed, Sincerely, Future Pollution
is a portent from the bygone year 2016:
“I’ve always felt quite
strongly that music is a thing that happened a long time ago and it happened
without us. I’ve always made recordings knowing that it was in some way a
facsimile or an homage to all the music I love. David Bowie and Prince happened
to be two very rare people who were actually inventing music. Their passing
brought them more forward into consciousness and I reconsidered how totally
unrestricted and unbound they were by any notion of taste or genre or style. I
thought, what a great way to work.”
Wresting sincerity from abstraction,
Kirk submits to the cycle of self-obsession at the album’s core. Sincerely,
Future Pollution is Timber Timbre’s document
of this generation’s degeneration and disarray. With Kirk as narrator, a party
to the play, we get caught in the folly of the echo chamber, awed by the contrast
of this gothic modern age.
Signed and Sealed, Sincerely,
The Pollution
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