Jaymes young fragments meaning3/9/2023 ![]() ![]() Okay, there’s the seeds of something here, especially if you want to make comment on how algorithms help shape human behaviour or how technocrats operate within late capitalism, you’ve got plenty of runway if you want to tell a dystopian story. That takes us to the writing… and I’ll give Bastille this, on the surface the theme isn’t bad, creating an escapist, quasi-VR concept called ‘Futurescape’ that uses modern flashy tech branding and may be alternative reality but also could have some elements of mind control as well. And that’s not counting songs like ‘Thelma & Louise’ and ‘Shut Off The Lights’ and ‘Club 57’ that fly off on wild tangents that only barely connect to any themes here! ![]() But there are three major problems that characterize Give Me The Future, and the first being that I’m just not sure there’s enough even here to earn the qualifier of ‘epic’ - it’s barely over a half hour, the shortest Bastille album to date, and three of the thirteen songs are interludes, creating more the impression of pop songs drenched in sci-fi iconography rather than creating a narrative. Yeah, the vocoders are a new addition, but not a bad one: given Dan Smith can be a little limited as an expressive singer, I don’t mind adding effects to amplify a personality, especially if he keeps the rich well of backing vocals behind him. Folks, this is something special: the sort of disaster that’s fun to talk about and where I’m not even mad I’m reviewing it, a project somewhere in between Muse’s Simulation Theory, The 1975’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, and maybe a dash of Billy Idol’s long-forgotten disaster of an album Cyberpunk, the sort of sci-fi splatter painting where you might grasp on the surface the quasi-dystopian exploration that Bastille is attempting, but the end result cannot help but have me laughing hysterically… at least until I untangled it further and realized not only did I have way too much to say, but that this tested my patience in ways I didn’t expect.Īnd what I find fascinating is that this had potential: once again the band kept their production crew in-house, they’ve had conceptual experiments before, and Bastille has always been a deeply uncool and profoundly earnest band - or at least that was the emotional throughline that Dan Smith could best sell - so a sci-fi dystopian epic is not far afield, and you can tell Dan Smith is trying his hardest with this. ![]() The better word - and I’m loathe to use it unless I mean it - is pretentious, implying a lot more thematic depth than they can back up, but to their credit it never felt disingenuous or coming from a bad place, which meant their material was more dull than aggravating.Īnd that was what I was expecting to happen with Give Me The Future, just Bastille sinking further into the quagmire of commercialcore, where they’d have lofty thematic statements but little in the sound to support it - I mean come on, their last big hit stateside was ‘Happier’ with Marshmello, if you want a way to guarantee my expectations were rock bottom, that would be it, to the point I was prepared to just put this in On The Pulse and call it a day, save myself the grief…Īnd yet I don’t think I could have predicted this. But the deeper I’ve gone into their catalog - especially their follow-up projects after Bad Blood in 20 - the less I’ve been impressed, with production feeling increasingly colourless and the writing never grasping the nuances of framing and subtext that might take them to a deeper place. And unsurprisingly, none of my reviews of their work have been all that popular, and I get why: they’ve got a (mostly) unique sound and a lot of earnestness and writing that at least seems to glance at higher concepts, which can be enough to pull in a silent majority audience hell, that’s how they initially won me over. I was not planning on making this a solo review, but I think it’s fair to say that I was expecting nothing with this album.Īnd I mean, can you blame me? Why would I expect anything from Bastille in 2022? After a few promising moments on their debut and a few songs I do like even if I think they’ve aged in weird ways, Bastille has had all of the self-serious importance of a band with higher conceptual ambitions and so little in the execution to back it up, which has mostly led to their albums being sloppily produced and tedious, more often forgotten than disliked. ![]()
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