Trans Am - "Futureworld"
(Thrill Jockey Records [U.S.] / City Slang Records [Germany], 1998)
After a few unassuming retro post-rock / deconstructed-metal LPs with sarcastic synth splatters, Trans Am reprogrammed their algorithms to finally allow for vocals and true song structure. Their recipe came to terrific fruition on their 1999 album Futureworld, whose title was, I assumed, a reference to CAN's album Future Days. But like I said above, I'm now pretty certain it referred to that movie. This one goes out to Joey Buttons & Kathi. I bought lots of cool CDs from their booth at the Record Raid in March, and it turned out they were also at the '99 Trans Am concert I will be talking about below. [Update: Oops; only Joey was at it.] This album came out in early '99, so I dated the song 1998, the year it was recorded. This is the most effort I've ever put into a post, so I hope somebody gets something out of it...
The song's greatness is pretty self-explanatory, so there's not much to say here, other than to point out that it's a song about the isolation that people will feel as we become more bogged down by gadgetry that supposedly allows us to stay more interconnected. Sound like 1999? 2012? Well, imagine how it'll be in 2050, 3000, or 5000. (5000? Yeah right... I'll give you a million dollars if humans even make it past 2200.) Sebastian "Seb" Thomson is simply one of the best drummers in history. You can tell he's heavily influenced by Jaki from CAN, yielding that style that is uniquely choppy & funky, yet sleek & robotic. He probably wears a shirt less frequently than Dave Navarro or Matthew McConaughey. When the song slows down at about the 4:20 mark and shifts into a sinister, "prowling" mode, it's just the coolest thing ever. I think Nathan sings "the falling snow" during the second half, but the vocoder is much more heavily used in that half, so your guess is as good as mine. The music video was edited down by 2.5 minutes, omitting most of the ending, and sucked in many other innovative ways too:
Fun Fact: Yes, that's Ed Helms, later of The Daily Show, The Office, and The Hangover, in a cameo appearance on banjo.
As far as other tracks on this album are concerned, "Television Eyes" (whose title is a reference to the Stooges' "TV Eye") and "Cocaine Computer" (please, folks, no jokes about Whitney Houston's Facebook account) are unquestionably the best. In fact, I struggled for a long time deciding whether to post "Futureworld" or "Television Eyes," and had to look to my orb for guidance.
The early '99 Thrill Jockey mailorder catalog has this very succinct sales pitch for the album: "Can you say vocoder? Sure you can – VO CODE R. Lawful evil beats, nature documentaries, car chases and rock and roll anthems."
Jonathan Bunce of Eye Weekly gave the album a 5-star rating, and said "The world's most forward-looking rock band has created the definitive millennial document. Forget the false hopes and fears surrounding the three big zeros -- this is the sound of technocracy collapsing into banality. 'Sitting alone in my future home / Fax machine, telephone / Phonograph, gramophone,' sings Nathan Means on Futureworld's drone-rockin' title track, with a gentle melancholy that would sound alienated even if it wasn't processed by a vocoder. Yes, the fourth Trans Am disc is the first to feature vocal stylings and embrace pop melodies -- which enhances, rather than dilutes, their conceptual electro-rock assault. On first glance, the trio seems to have turned into Kraftwerk, with Teutonic titles such as 'Am Rhein' and the motorik melodics of 'Runners Standing Still' -- one imagines them waiting out Y2K in a Berlin bunker with only Six Finger Satellite for company. But there's accessibility, depth, humor and chaos colliding here, from the more-bounce-to-the-ounce bleepery of 'Cocaine Computer' to the aggressive fuzz-bass destruction of 'City in Flames' to the lighter-in-the-air finale of 'Sad and Young.' Just as last year's The Surveillance had the final word on urban paranoia, Futureworld says more about the sci-fi dystopia we live in than any Hollywood blockbuster ever could."
My Trans Am timeline:
First read about them in Nov. 1996 in a Thrill Jockey mailorder catalog
Got their debut album Trans Am on vinyl in March '98
Missed them live a month or so later at the Mermaid Lounge in New Orleans due to having to cram for a test that night; swore I'd catch them the next time out
Read a glowing review of Futureworld in Mar. '99 in Spin*
Finally got to see them in May '99 (with lame openers Pan Sonic and The Fucking Champs) at the Mermaid
Got Futureworld on vinyl in 2005
*I also bought Moonshake's Dirty & Divine that day at that store
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| Note: Local instrumental prog / post-metal band Weedeater (not the stoner metal Weedeater from North Carolina) were for some reason replaced on the bill by The Fucking Champs. I never got to see "our" Weedeater; check out this clip (probably from '94 or '95, based on the Dead Eye Dick video teaser at the end) of them. Trans Am's first album sounded a lot like this. |
At the concert, they played a couple of vocoder-ed songs, hence they played "Futureworld" and "Television Eyes," the two best songs on the album. And I remember someone in the audience shouting out "Illegal Ass!," which I later learned was a song from one of their obscure EPs. Here are pics from that show, taken by me and Andrew Mister on my Kodak disposable camera; sorry for the small file sizes:
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A Loyola student was filming Trans Am and projecting the images in real-time onto a screen behind them while they played. This must have been a digital camcorder, because the images were being altered in various ways to make the band look like computer-animated drawings and/or robots. Unfortunately this did not show up in the pics because the flash drowned it out. As you can imagine, I would give anything for a video of this gig! Nate was sporting an all-gold basketball uniform for some reason... Coincidentally, the Washington Bullets/Wizards briefly changed their main jersey color to gold several years later. For good measure, here's a pic of Finnish minimalist techno "band" Pan Sonic (f.k.a. Panasonic) playing their "music" while standing behind lots of expensive equipment:
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I never saw Trans Am again, even though they came through here a few more times. They toured arenas(!) opening for Tool in late 2007, and I actually almost went to see one of those dates, but I had not paid any attention to either band for about five years, so I skipped it. Futureworld was reissued on LP with remastered sound and free digital download (containing two rare tracks) in late 2011.
Monday, Apr. 30: Saw Dayna Kurtz at the Hi-Ho Lounge; got there late and only saw the last 30 or so minutes. There were only about 20 people there. Like most folk singers with an affinity for New Orleans (Ani Difranco comes to mind), she has allowed NOLA's music to influence her recent music for the worse.
Tuesday, May 1: My dad had knee arthroscopy, so we helped him with icing it, etc. Dropped off a few trees at Parkway and had an impromptu conversation with Haley (sp.) for around 2 hours. She works for that organization and I just volunteer there; she recently put in all the native trees around the "Big Lake" in City Park by the art museum. I showed her a separate farming plot a block away that she had never been to, which kind of blew her mind. She signed me up to do a long-term project with her that will involve us designing and planting a fruit orchard for some new school in New Orleans East. It's kind of a thrill when an attractive, much younger lady follows one around and writes down one's botanical musings on her notepad for a few hours, but I didn't let it go to my head. Okay, I did, but who wouldn't? It was one of those "I've got the brawn, you've got the brains" kind of things.
Afterwards, went to Home Depot a few blocks away and saw a very rude older white lady verbally accosting a black male H.D. employee (and a white male one, who soon walked away and left the other guy to fend for himself) for a long time about something he had no control over. Specifically, light bulbs. Sample gripe: "You people who work at Home Depot are almost as bad as the ones who work at Lowe's nowadays." Reported her b.s. to a store manager, and mentioned that if it were my store, I'd kick her out. Shot hoops at the Annunciation St. court, and then, for the first time ever, at the NOPD station's court on Magazine. The latter was a bit difficult because the rims are a little too high (some courts do this to discourage dunking, which damages rims) and were double-thickness (which makes the ball bounce wildly on even a slightly-errant shot). Got dad some chocolate with bacon in it at La Dulce Vita. Had New Girl Night with Em, mom, dad, Vanessa.
Wed., May 2: Despite a sudden rainstorm, I stopped off at a small nursery on the Westbank that I almost never go to. Ended up talking to the employee for about an hour about tons of stuff after she asked me "Want a free tomato plant?" in the greenhouse. Let's see, we talked about cacti, tomatoes, mushrooms, music (she used to have punk bands play at her apartment), tattoos, asparagus ferns, atheism, Russian sage, etc. I showed her that the white petals of the Pineapple Guava tree look, feel, and taste like marshmallows, which she was pretty impressed by. Definitely my dream girl, and I think she spoiled me for all other females in the future... (And of course, the rain magically stopped right after I walked in.) And to top it all off, the last song I heard on the radio (WTUL) right before turning my car off and going in was a song that I later found out was "Endless Summer" by this Aussie band called The Jezabels. Kind of a mash-up of Kate Bush, U2, and Sunny Day Real Estate. My point is that it's a really dramatic song that seems tailor-made to lead into something great, kind of like the boombox scene in Say Anything. So overall, it was like a scene out of a movie: I hear that song in my car while it's raining; something impels me to go into a plant store; the rain stops to make way for the "endless summer"; I meet The One and we hit it off. And knowing my luck, I probably never see her again... But for me, a great convo is better than sex, and probably less grueling than a marriage. She's a big fan of mushrooms and '70s psych music, so I made a mental note to give her a CD-R of Amanita by Bardo Pond.
Later that day, I planted my Mayhaw tree in Vacherie during another bout of rain as the sun went down. Watched a bunch of videos by EatTheWeeds, which are always fascinating, until the wee hours.
Over the past few days, I've planted a Viburnum dentatum (Arrowwood) and Lyonia lucida (Fetterbush), as well as those free tomato plants. Deciding if I want to accept some free tickets to Jazz Fest today from my sister; the only good act is the Foo Fighters, but they're playing for 2 full hours, and I recently became obsessed with their song "Best Of You." Saw them in '97, and that gap of years would usually preclude me from seeing the same band nowadays; but they've had a ton of good singles since then. Dave Grohl's semi-ironic "metal warrior" posturing really sticks in my craw, though, and it's gonna be 95ยบ heat index today with possible rain. Decisions, decisions...
In honor of heat, humidity, my dad's knees, and film cameras, here's me, Em & dad on a pier on the Mississippi coast in mid-1990. The fam was tagging along with him en route to one of his many triathlons that he did ca. 1990-92. He's 38 in that pic. I was wearing my LSU Basketball Camp t-shirt which I had just gotten weeks earlier. Shaquille O'Neal signed the back of it at the camp right after a breathtaking LSU intrasquad scrimmage. That's the only athlete autograph I've ever requested or received; unfortunately I never took a pic of it before throwing the shirt away a few years ago.
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| Yes, we threw them back |
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