Album excerpts:

"The Simple Life"

"Tonight"

"The Station"

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The Juan Maclean : The Future Will Come
released on DFA
reviewed by Gaspar Oliveira for GBH.tv

John Maclean's pretty used to being ahead of the pack. Back in his days as guitarist for Six Finger Satellite, he blended krautrock ambience, hard rock, and disco rhythms together in ways that confounded everybody. In 2005, as the Juan Maclean, he blended Detroit techno and electrofunk in ways that people are still catching up to on the funky yet desolate Less Than Human.

In both cases, Maclean kept himself out of the spotlight; though he handled vocals on Less Than Human, his voice was usually Vocoded or multi-tracked to the point of anonymity, and his hectoring lyrics revealed nothing more than a kind of party ethos.

So it should come as no surprise that, in an era where the cloak of anonymity has descended over even the most popular dance music, Maclean has skipped ahead and put himself front and center. On The Future Will Come, Maclean and long-time friend and collaborator Nancy Whang present eight surprisingly detailed snapshots of a romantic relationship. There are good times (the magnificent, epic "Happy House") and bad times (the cutting "The Station"), moments of bittersweet reminiscence ("Tonight") and wry gamesmanship ("No Time"). Though it ends on an optimistic note (the aforementioned "Happy House" closes things out), there is a compelling tension that runs through The Future Will Come, as its outlook swerves from good to bad.

Unfortunately, that swerving between positive and negative also applies to The Future's music. Maclean, along with collaborators Holy Ghost and James Murphy, shows off his peerless tastes again, blending Human League synth pop, acid house squiggles, Chicago house, and shambling, prime DFA percussion. But tracks like the hipster kiss-off title track and the self-pitying "Human Disaster" reveal Maclean's deficiencies at pop craft; there is a strange distance between music and vocals that makes many of these songs hard to love. And without a blueprint for singing over much of this music, a lot of the phrasing and inflection on these songs feels awkward.

But inconsistencies aside, The Future Will Come does Maclean and DFA proud. With dance music finally beginning to impact the mainstream after decades of hiding in the darkness, The Future Will Come proves that it can be done, and done well.

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