An emotional recasting of Silverchair’s 1997 single Freak, Johns pens third-person lyrics to his hit single, looking back at the earth-shaking trauma of his teenage fame. D4NGRSBOY has hooks for days.įreakNever is the track that will elicit the most discussion and disagreement among fans. Somebody Call An Ambulance benefits from its late-run sequencing, bursting through like a sun ray and finding the ghost of Luke Steele still lurking in Johns’ songwriting years after their fruitful collaborations. I Feel Electric sounds like pristine Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson. The exercises in genre-hopping throughout FutureNever are mostly successful. It is a stunning pocket symphony, in the vein of Silverchair songs Tuna in the Brine and Across the Night. Johns delayed the album’s release by three weeks in order to include a collaboration with Van Dyke Parks that needed more work a wise move, as Emergency Calls Only is the record’s high-water mark, both musically and emotionally. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning When We Take Over, another treacly tune, sounds like an open-call audition for a Broadway musical. 3 completes the Young Modern trilogy of whimsical, twerping tunes, but with far more weight. Likewise, closing track Those Thieving Birds Pt. It’s a high-wire act and he only occasionally slips. Johns’ grander orchestral ambitions are pushed to 11 on opener Reclaim Your Heart his full-throated vocal is so rich and completely over the top, pushed so high in the mix, that it feels uncomfortably intimate at times, sliding towards histrionics while somehow still feeling sincere. As a collection of music, it is unassailable, ambitious, and often brilliant, with the album’s high points sitting among his very best work.įutureNever begins and ends with the same piano run, a stab at cohesion furthered by Johns’ decision to bookend the record with the two most bombastic songs of his career, both of which would have been at home on the Dracula puppet musical.
Which is only to say that FutureNever makes for an uneven album. As a concept album, it seems suspiciously reverse-engineered. As a statement of intent, it is inscrutable. It’s shocking Johns released this in the traditional album format at all, considering the sonic dissonance. There’s also a lot more guitar shredding than expected, despite this being very much not a guitar record. There are four songs that seem like offcuts from an aborted operetta, a few dance collaborations that belong on Ministry of Sound mixes, and a handful of tracks that split the difference between the slinky electro of his debut solo album, Talk, and his bright and loopy Dissociatives work with Paul Mac.
FutureNever feels like a number of separate projects played on shuffle.
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