| Future Clouds & Radar (Dec.08 issue) |
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| Written by Fred Mills | |
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Page 1 of 3  Surrounded By LightThere Are No Gloomy Days for Future Clouds & Radar – It’s All Sunshine. So this is how it’s supposed to happen: you walk into a club and some group you’ve never seen before, after just a handful of songs, leaves you speechless, an idiot grin smeared across your face and your hands fluttering in the air from the electric current you’ve just been zapped with. Well, that’s how we want it to happen. In truth, sadly, such an idealized vision of the “wow” factor is increasingly elusive nowadays, where blog-hyped expectations are so hyperventilatingly high we’re doomed to disappointment from the get-go. Me, though, I got lucky. From my South By Southwest ’07 notes: It was one of those pinch-me moments: Wandering into Austin ensemble Future Clouds & Radar’s set, I was simultaneously brought to my knees and rocketed into the stratosphere by the band’s neo-orchestral pop, equal parts Beatles and World Party, Crowded House and Flaming Lips, and with rootsy elements lining the edges. For some of the songs the band performed as a quintet, serving up expansive, jangly compositions as tuneful as any classic powerpop as you could name, and when Robert Harrison (ex-Cotton Mather) – part frontman, part conductor, part ringmaster – brought out a string quartet for other songs and a horn section for still others, the sound spread forth, pouring off the stage and filling up the performance ballroom. It was cinematic in scope, confident in execution. “You probably were lucky,” says Robert Harrison now, chuckling softly when I recount seeing Future Clouds & Radar in Austin a year and a half or so ago. We’re on the phone for a marathon interview covering his ’90s tenure fronting Cotton Mather all the way up to FC&R’s new album Peoria, issued on their Star Apple Kingdom label. His reaction to my reaction is, I think, both literal – touring and financial realities means it’s unlikely that most fans will get to see the full-blown, 13-member version of FC&R anytime soon unless they catch ’em on home turf – and cerebral: a tacit acknowledgment of what I outlined in the first paragraph above, because Harrison, an astute student of pop, has surely been both gobsmacked and let down by bands himself. He also reckons he’s pretty lucky. But we’ll get to that in a sec. |
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