The Juan Maclean
The Future Will Come
(DFA Records)

The Juan MacLean's sophomore record, The Future Will Come, is nothing short of a masterpiece for DFA's most criminally underrated producer, as stunning a leap forward from the MacLean's first album, Less Than Human, as labelmates LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver was from their self-titled debut, if not more so.

Briefly, The Future Will Come sounds like the Human League making sweet robotic love to classic house music, but without sounding the least bit dated or retro. The house is most evident in the unstoppably uplifting piano chords of the appropriately titled "Happy House" and the orchestral hits on "One Day," which you wish would just keep looping forever. The Human League influence is easy to spot as well: Beyond the icy-cool synthesizers, several of the tracks rely on the male-female vocal interplay between Juan MacLean and DFA all-star Nancy Whang (who's overdue for a solo album). "One Day" even winkingly acknowledges this debt, with Whang mechanically singing, "I can't hear you, baby/When you tell me you don't want me now," in a not-so-subtle nod to "Don't You Want Me" (more astute listeners than I have suggested that "A New Bot" bites the drum sounds from "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of").

Lyrically, MacLean is still deploying Asimovian existentialism about humans, robots, and their relative frailties and superiorities. (Zomg! Robots can't feel pain or die, but they can't feel love, either!) More interesting, though, is the subtext of the album's awesome bookends, the building synth-and-drum groove of "The Simple Life" and the epic, multipart space odyssey "Happy House," which shifts from DFA disco to early house to a final acid freak-out over the course of 12 and a half minutes. On the former, MacLean moans about the drag of domesticity and the allure of oblivion ("Giving in to a simple life was nothing that I wanted with you/The great unknown is the only place I wanted to see") while Whang mourns losing him to the void; on the latter, Whang is grateful for being brought "home to this happy house," seemingly equating the simple life with the ecstatic refrain, "Launch me into space."

In between the two songs, there's much more than first meets the eye with these robots, and it makes for that rarest of things (although increasingly a DFA specialty): a dance record that's as emotionally deep as it is kinetically moving.