The Big Pink:Future This

     
          4AD; 2012
          Dropped by Robert Miller

The Big Pink have traded in distortion and garage dance music for synths, sing-a-long choruses and arena-rock rip offs. The overall groove of the beats and revealing lines like, “If you really love him / Tell me you love him again” on 2009’s debut, A Brief History of Love, have been ransacked and left for dead. Now, with the sophomore release, Future This, we get what sounds like The Big Pink’s imitation of British pop rock. In American terms, it’s like 2012’s poor version of Foster the People.

Right from the get-go on “Stay Gold” you can tell exactly where this band is heading. It seems to aspire to everything that indie music already accomplished through MGMT and The Shins and everything British arena rock already mastered through Coldplay and Muse. And there’s a reason why those inspirations aren’t all that relative to each other. It feels as though The Big Pink is striving for grand gestures to follow up their modestly successful debut. They’re pulling from other artists too much. In an interview with NME, lead singer Robbie Furze said that Future This took a lot of influence from hip-hop. He later retracted the statement, but that’s a pretty clear sign for the aimless, meandering quality they happened to stumble upon here.

On songs like “Stay Gold” and “Palaces,” you can practically see the music video in the making as stage lights scatter across a sea of teenager’s faces singing their hearts out: “A time to love, a time to fly / And beat the darkness into light.” It’s feel-good poetry at its worst. Not only that—the album begins to feel like one unending chorus. Furze repeats lines over and over again, as if repetition somehow equals significance.

The two core members, Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell, play off of each other like awkward toddlers who can’t exactly understand what the other is thinking. Their idea of “grooves” is the labored “Jump Song,” which carries with it this early 90’s version of futuristic music. The album continually feels like a dupe, as if the band is thinking they can trick you into believing they know what they’re doing this time around.

Then again, not every note of Future This is a cheesy rendition of tried indie-pop tropes and boring U-2 trance. Some songs, like “Lose Your Mind,” have some of the infectiousness of Phoenix’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, while most of the rest of the album seems more like “Dominoes” off of A Brief History. The drowning, mellow “77” may close the album off with a glimmer of hope that there’s still some original thought behind this British duo. But until there’s more proof, Future This will continue to ramble, lost in its own confusing aspirations.