Timber Timbre's Sincerely, Future Pollution Saw The Coming Dystopia Before Most Of Us
Taylor Kirk’s Synth Noir Experiment Looked To Our Future With Dread And Condemnation. He Was Right.
Tristan Young @talltristan
Just looking at the artwork seems ominous. A monochrome skyline shrouded in black, its darkness perforated by hundreds of building lights. The towering claustrophobia haunts with its oppression, looming above us like something unnervingly inevitable. The form is of seemingly benign infrastructure, the mere scaffolding behind the fabric of everyday life and culture. But it‘s intent is oozing with malice, something it had been doing longer than we had ever noticed prior. That noxious mixture of modernity and industry, suffocating everything in and around it, stares back at us as we into it, like gazing upon a swiftly encroaching future. These are the sentiments of Sincerely, Future Pollution by Timber Timbre. It is evocative of the discontent we have ensconced ourselves in, even if we would rather it wouldn’t be. Released in 2017 in the early stages of what is now the firmly dystopian reality of Trump’s presidency, Timber Timbre front man Taylor Kirk realized little had to be done in the way of a rhetorical manifesto to show what had happened, and what we had let happen. All that was needed was to show us who we are, knowing all the way with a sliver of sinister assurance that what we saw would be surreal and confusing in the extreme. Sincerely, Future Pollution finds its voice in that confusion, and makes it up to us to understand it.
Timber Timbre, headed by Kirk, had much more pastoral origins than it’s current incarnation may suggest. Birthed from recording sessions in a log cabin in the rural outreaches of Ontario, Kirk and his band mates forged a sound through pathos injected blues and misty folk country. They were sombre, crooning, and with a dynamic easy to romanticise. As our current hell scape of a society was only just coming into clear focus several years ago, Kirk felt less and less enthused by the idea of making music with rewarding themes just waiting to be handed out to the listeners. He wanted to make something of the time, something that could be looked back on as not just a harsher kind of commentary, but a warning. He endeavoured to show how society was presented and packaged, and how we had all willingly altered that package. Why, and for what.
“I think the tone and the result on the record is utter chaos and confusion”, Kirk offered, looking back on it. That mystifying, intangible sense of disorientation is encoded into the DNA of the album. Kirk and his recording partners moved outside of their comfort zone for this record in more ways than one. Holing up beyond the city limits of Paris, he and his band mates swapped out almost all of the gear they were used to recording with. All the synths, sequencers, etc. they chose this time were exotic irregularities to them. The rich warmth of their previous album Hot Dreams would be replaced by the filtered, gapping maw of the Jupiter 8, among other things. Sincerely, Future Pollution has a resultant aesthetic of a color-drained oil slick, swirling in increasingly contaminated water, the clarity being more and more obscured with each invasive revolution of liquid grime.
Kirk wanted a sound that wasn’t just comfortable with this confusion, but thrived within it, embraced it even. Song structures and abnormal rhythms would revel in the technical ambiguities of the album, reinforced by Kirk’s at times impenetrable lyrics. The title track, Sincerely, Future Pollution codifies this with aplomb, going from sly instrumental noir thriller to sci fi brain melter and back. Grit coated guitars, industrial drones and the gothic sensibilities of Trent Reznor make for something inhospitable, but for reasons you can’t quite determine. That lack of certitude implores you to study it further, and paradoxically, enjoy it. Elsewhere Skin Tone is peculiar yet enticing in how relaxed it is amidst the confusion and subversion of its own making. The casual tone, despite bizarre sonic cores tacitly exempts the listener from such concerns. Instead you feel compelled to let the alien beat take you where it’s going without a care for the rhetorical implications.
As it progresses, Kirk is clever with his condemnations and reveals, and the pace at which he releases them throughout the album. Beginning with an ambiguous sense of something being some howoff, he then rips into systemic and institutional corruption as the malignant source of our ills. He then interrogates our role in programming these systems. Finally he admonishes us for willingly and happily envisioning them, the consequences to everything from our morality to the climate being worthwhile casualties to the luxuries it will afford some of us. In album opener Velvet Gloves And Spit Kirk occupies a space somewhere between a more sedate version of Future Islands and exactly Lou Reed. The slow moving synth blues ballad carries vestiges of his earlier work, not yet signalling how unceremoniously these cozy conformities will soon be dropped for something more nebulous. He croons, “I recall the velvet gloves and spit in your embrace”. Kirk takes the idea of a traditional romance story, something akin the cultural norms that have come to define western comfort and Americana, and renders it in a manner that is slightly atypical, a bit perverse. It’s a recognizable tale, but something is out of whack, somehow. It’s a wonderfully minimalist lyrical device Kirk uses here to imply perhaps we should be looking at all aspects of our world with a more staunchly observational glare.
Kirk removes the guardrails and the introductory ease of the first track with Grifting, a track that is undeniably the spiritual and literal successor to Bowie’s Fame. Gaudy and tweaked out guitars, zany flashes of synth, and the winding beat builds to the chorus in a similar manner to Fame. Even the syncopated timing of the last syllable of “Grifting” lands in the exact same manner Bowie shouted his title from the rooftops. It’s uncanny. Beyond that, Kirk employs a didactic lyrical tool set to list off all the forms of corruption casually hiding in plain sight, sometimes not even hiding at all. “Bogus Hunches”, are equated with “Justice”, in about the most succinct critique on the state of law enforcement you are ever going to get. It goes on like this, “Double dipping, earning/ rackets, bluffing, lunches”. It’s all slightly sickening and it’s all business as usual. Kirk states that there is no longer a need to hide such immorality behind a poker face as the raunchy con man strut of the track brims with pride. What’s stopping it?
If there is an implication that our societal troubles are a machine to be raged against, Kirk swiftly dumps cold, polluted water on the idea with the more central and burrowing Western Questions. The most maudlin and weary of the bunch, it drops the surreal glee of drawing our twisted world for something more sincerely sombre. Through a sobering commentary on our racist immigration policies, or just plain racist polices he draws a connection between such injustices and what, exactly we got out of it. “Cloaked in safety at the counter of a luxury liner with a noose in my hand” he mourns, in devastatingly prophetic terms, predicting the coming lynchings that would soon be once again in vogue in America. We have drifted, aimlessly into authoritarianism just so some of us can have a taste of the finer things in life, while we pretend that wealth hording philanthropists will be our moral guide posts so long as they pose for a photo op from time to time. Even the solo at the end, with strained and heartfelt chords, seems more remorseful. This didn’t happen to us, we did it ourselves. “Elixirs ware off and each dose is the cost of a memory”, he bemoans earlier in Moment. It shouldn’t have to be this hard for us to see the world for what it is.
The heart of the matter is never fully revealed in the same way Kirk shines a disinfecting light on other parts of his lyrical intentions. However, he hints at something deeper into the album’s morass, but only a hint. Kirk is at his most infuriatingly obtuse, right when we reach the ostensible core in Sincerely, Future Pollution:
“Smoke rainbow, a halo out, a UFO light/ a high glam and lazy song of Sarah’s smile/ a custodian in love, the blue steel power and the tower of solution/ signed and sealed, ‘Sincerely, the pollution’”.
It’s maddeningly esoteric, which is of course in keeping with an album enshrined in cloak and dagger tactics. Any literal break down of Kirk’s thesis would have ultimately been a myopic disappointment. He does give you just enough of a clue, or a trail of bread crumbs to follow. Who is Sarah? Or more aptly, what is Sarah? The answer becomes a bit more perceptible at the end of the album with Floating Cathedral. For the first time since Velvet Gloves And Spit the sound production returns to something more traditionally lovelorn and poetic. At this point it almost seems sonically and thematically retrograde, but there is more going on here than first observances would imply. As Kirk pines and yearns for Sarah, one can take this literally, or interpret it though everything else he has shown us. One possible conclusion is Sarah is nothing more than amalgam for the racially or financially privileged idea of ‘normal’. An easy, affluent life built on the foundations of societal rot we are all too happy to ignore from behind our pristine enclosures. The world can go to hell as long as everything looks good on our instagram feed. We romanticize the idea, cling to its totemic markers, and close our eyes to the gluttony that has consumed everything else. Just keep the pleasant melody playing.
We hide from that gluttony, the grime, the dirt, the sludge and everything else on the other side of our Faustian deal with the worst versions of ourselves, but it is always there. Kirk hones in on this dichotomy through the synth noir cinematic flare in much of the album, with his bordering on vulgar depictions of our current moment. Moment spirals into a triumphant cyber punk guitar jam reminiscent of Twin Shadow or Gang of Four, but not before he bemoans, “Precision of plans, a gutter lies so long and friendless”. A great deal of mileage can be drawn from the contrasts of sequences like the out of body wonderment and bizarre serenity of Skin Tone, compared to the subterranean malaise of a line like “Let the slime come, the gelatinous walls of the seeds that seldom remain”, in Western Questions.The subjectively pretty moments in “Floating Cathedral” are not immune from such toxins. Slipped into the hazy revelries Kirk sings, “A Coney Island mermaid caught out in the sludge”. Kirk after all did warn he would drop the Floating Cathedral into the sewer during Moment, in an interesting bit of meta signalling outside of the narrative. He channels these two incongruous ideas into a messy singularity in the murkySewer Blues. The deeply burrowing synth recalls the darker moments of Drive, and certainly not the sweeter ones. Its churning industrial guitars are grimly mechanical as he sings of a vapour filled tomb. In its cavernous spaces, envisioning a horror-core version of Chris Isaac, Kirk warns, “Order of the underground adventure, the sewer runs clear”.
It’s thematically appropriate that the most unpleasant track- lets say the nastiest- is the one where he takes a more direct aim at Trump, “The voice of nausea and fear, unholy jargon in the judgment seat”. That I’m writing this on the very same day he tear gassed unarmed protesters for a photo op at a place of worship to threaten his own population is absolutely not lost on me. Libraries of vicious screeds have and will be written about that small coward. Kirk’s more oblique and venomous takedown is a worthy inclusion.
Listening to Sincerely, Future Pollution, this obscured atmosphere of mystery is always obviously present. However, there is a deeper layer that is harder to put into descriptive terms, unless someone has already done it for us. In his excellent review of the album for Drowned In Sound at the time of its release, Adam Turner-Heffer observed it’s ‘Lynchian song structures’ and that’s about as apt a description of the record as a whole as you are going to get. Listening to certain tracks with this mindset is revelatory. Skin Tone just screams Twin Peaks at you, in its own idiosyncratic way. The strange lounge room mystery of Western Questions is surrounded by a torrent of more feral sounds keeping you at bay like the inverse of a black hole. The black-lit triumph of the album’s instrumental prowess in this regard is undoubtedly the absolute trip that is Bleu Nuit. The bizarre procession of tones and pacing, both alien and oddly retro is thrilling. Sprawling gothic synth scales flutter with anal-retentive perfection but give way to queasy sax. Bristling drum machines chug with the panache of an old school slasher flick while chilling keyboards build in bloody momentum. It all gives way to a fiendishly robotic voice filtered through so many vocoders so as to be unintelligible. Kirk never revealed what the lyrics are. It serves as one of the more intriguing questions unlikely to ever be answered about the project.
If you were going into Sincerely, Future Pollution expecting something of a direct narrative or clear thesis- that’s fair! It’s not as if that was outside of Kirk’s wheelhouse in previous albums. Inscrutable though it may be at times, it is ultimately an encouraging and successful experiment from an artist that was on the cusp of being cornered into the congenial if unambitious definitions of Canadian folk. With this album, Kirk didn’t just expand his skill set; he discarded it, building something new from the ground up. Sure, what he built is a touch unpleasant, a little arrogant, and occasionally depressing. But welcome to any year of the past several. That’s us. If we want better commentary we are well within our rights to build toward better times. The tone of this album implies Kirk is sceptical. When he inserts an escape hatch of a line like “undo every other year”, as if that was our best option, you know the options aren’t good. Still Kirk did post date the whole endeavour as if to give us a chance to course correct. The noir slicked ooze of his particular dystopia isn’t quite here; we may still have hope with the time we are given. Of course he never bothers to mention how much time exactly we have left. Just one more mystery.