The Juan MacLean’s new album, The Future Will Come, begins
with romantic dissolution and ends in domestic bliss; in between, there
are robots. These robots fight, flirt, fuck, and eventually, against
all logical odds, fall in love. They are voiced by John MacLean and
Nancy Whang, the Juan MacLean’s principal players for this album. They
are, like all androids, both less than human and in some ways stronger
than human, although mostly they’re just a metaphor for how cold and
mechanical being human can sometimes feel.
MacLean first developed a thing for the man-machines in high school,
when he became a fan of the pioneering electronic music of Kraftwerk
and the head-fucking science fiction of Philip K. Dick.
“I’m not a big science-fiction fan,” says Mac-Lean. “I have an
aversion to the whole fantasy realm of science fiction. But a writer
like Philip K. Dick just raised a lot of philosophical questions about
the nature of being human.
“And being that young, and discovering this German electronic
band—these guys who were professing to be robots, would dress up
in these uniforms, at one point actually had robots that took their
place playing onstage, and they were singing about [robots], using
vocoders, and playing really locked-down music that back then sounded
really futuristic—that became such an influence for me throughout
my entire music career.”
In 1990, MacLean cofounded Providence, Rhode Island, band Six Finger
Satellite, a dark post-punk outfit to which MacLean lent skuzzy,
inhuman synthesizer (and guitar) tones, and which went on to record
five albums for Sub Pop between 1993 and 1998. When that band
dissolved, MacLean retired from music for a while and spent some time
battling a heavy drug addiction. (“Being addicted to those drugs was an
incredibly monotonous existence,” says MacLean. “Doing the same really
unexciting things every single day, with episodes of insanity—you
do become very robotic.”)
In the early 2000s, James Murphy (Six Finger Satellite’s sound guy
and an old friend) convinced MacLean to record for his then-fledgling
DFA label. In 2002 and 2003, the Juan MacLean released a string of
superb singles, ranging from the pulsing big-room techno of “You Can’t
Have It Both Ways” to the sly electro-funk workout “Give Me Every
Little Thing,” followed in 2005 by the less-striking full-length debut
Less Than Human.
But if Less Than Human was a relative letdown, MacLean’s
recent sophomore album, The Future Will Come, is a total
triumph, a huge leap forward for the Juan. For one thing, it’s a much
more lyrically ambitious album, with Human‘s piffling
dance-floor exhortations replaced by a loose, disconnected narrative
about two characters—humans? Robots?—trying (and ultimately
succeeding) to feel love.
It’s also naturally what you might call more song-oriented, with
just a few extended dance tracks bracketing several
three-or-four-minute-long synth-pop numbers. And whereas on previous
records, MacLean either ceded vocals to collaborators or relied on a
vocoder to process his voice, here he steps up to the microphone
unadorned, trading vocals equally with Whang. The male/female vocal
interplay, combined with the album’s glassy synthesizers, often recalls
the Human League (see especially “One Day” and “The Station”), only,
blessedly, without sounding overly retro.
“They became an easy sort of template to use,” says MacLean. “When
we first were talking about having an equal male/female presence
vocally, we were like, let’s go out and compile songs we like that
feature that kind of thing. I just assumed there was all kinds of stuff
out there like that, but the only thing we could really find was the
Human League.
“The intention from the beginning was to take it away from
first-person observations of relationship stuff into this realm of
getting both sides of the story,” MacLean continues. “I thought it made
for a much more compelling narrative arc.”
That arc begins with album opener “The Simple Life,” on which
MacLean sings, “Giving in to a simple life/Was nothing that I wanted
with you,” opting instead for the great unknown, much to Whang’s
distress. “One Day” sees Mac-Lean sifting through the memories and
detritus of the abandoned relationship (“A picnic on the
hillside/Clothes of many colors/Lying on the bedside”) while Whang
warns, “One day, baby, you’ll realize that I’m the only one.” “Tonight”
finds the lovers reuniting out at the club and going home together to
live ever after in the “Happy House” of the album’s ebullient final
track, a classic house epic in which an unstoppably uplifting piano
loop is launched into acid-strafed space while Whang sings wide-eyed
praises.
Throughout, there are shades of Dick’s android anxieties.
“It became an easy device to use,” says Mac-Lean of the robot
imagery, “an easy metaphor for my own feelings of alienation or
inability to connect with people.” At the same time, though, there’s an
implication of superiority—that the automaton might be better off
for not feeling either the joy of connection or the attendant pain of
disconnect. “I think that’s part of the conflict,” says MacLean. “You
know, it always seems like the person who’s more unfeeling or colder
wins out in these kinds of struggles, for better or for worse.”
Superimposed over the romantic plot and robot talk is a broader
existential conflict, made most explicit on album bookends “The Simple
Life” and “Happy House,” between the banal day-to-day and the desire
for some great escape (such themes make The Future Will Come a
timely thematic companion to Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post
Pavilion, if a stark sonic contrast). Of course, that desire can be
a kind of death-drive toward “oblivion,” or “the great unknown” can
turn out to be just as dull as what you hoped to leave behind (see
“drugs,” above).
Ultimately, though, the record ends on a hopeful note with “Happy
House.” The track not only makes a good case for music as an ideal, if
temporary, means of lifting off from this world, but also suggests that
some synthesis of the mundane and the transcendent is not entirely
impossible. Love wins out over alienation, the domestic becomes a
source of the ecstatic, and MacLean, it turns out, is human after all.
