Back to the Future

by Michael Pelusi

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Published: Apr 24, 2007

In the annals of unpopular pop, the late-'90s Austin, Texas, band Cotton Mather existed somewhere between unjustly ignored and burgeoning cult item.

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For those in the know, however, the band's hard-candy guitar pop yielded some great lost classics. They garnered comparisons to the likes of Guided by Voices, Squeeze and The Beatles — always The Beatles. Their 1997 album Kontiki was the breakthrough, a largely home-recorded effort that sounded more vibrant than most radio rock of the time and loaded with hooky head-scratchers with titles like "Homefront Cameo" and "My Before and After."

Despite critical raves and achievements such as opening for Oasis at Wembley Stadium, Cotton Mather remained something of a secret, culminating in their quiet breakup in 2002.

Now, six years after the last Mather album, the band's frontman, Robert Harrison (pictured), has made an ambitious comeback with a new collective dubbed Future Clouds and Radar, that's just released a two-disc self-titled debut on the Star Apple Kingdom label.

On the phone from his home, just a few days before South by Southwest began in nearby Austin, Harrison explained the unique circumstances behind the new project. Toward the end of Cotton Mather's career, he began suffering from back pains. "I actually had a debilitating spine condition that required I spend almost a year and a half lying on my back," he says. "But I made a full recovery and in the process of making the recovery I began to write this new and different music."

As collected on Future Clouds and Radar, the music he composed in that time varies significantly. There are a few Cotton Mather-esque anthems, like "Hurricane Judy" and "Get Your Boots On," and lovely ballads like "Quicksilver" and "Safety Zone." But there are also halting, off-kilter tracks (the opening "Birds of Prey," "This is Really a Book") and a few near-unclassifiable spoken-word-and-soundscapes ("Letters to Junius," "Cowboy Weather").

"I wrote it all on the ukulele because I couldn't play the guitar [at the time]. I wrote most of it lying on my back and doing this very deep meditation. It was a very interesting, somewhat mystical process that I went through."

Harrison balks a bit, however, from labeling it an out-and-out concept album. "Typically, we think of [concept albums] as something that adolescent boys get into before they discover sex and [which] involve codpieces and triumph and man vs. machine or whatever," he jokes. "But as a record about these themes of suffering and regeneration, specifically written largely in an altered state on ukulele, yeah, I think I'd call that a concept."

True to Harrison's description, Future Clouds and Radar moves with a sort of dream logic. And despite its two-disc length — quite an anomaly in an age that encourages artists to serve their music in increasingly smaller helpings — the album never feels ponderous or weighed down with filler.

Working with a large cast of Austin musicians, Harrison has created a wonderfully diverse set of arrangements. On one song, funeral-march horns might intrude; on another, found sounds lurk in the background, like a radio stuck between stations. The band's eerie version of Bob Marley's "Wake Up and Live" is most definitely the only one that makes room for both didgeridoo and trombone.

An intriguing musical thread running through the album — one that is a marked contrast to Cotton Mather's m.o. — is that almost all of the harmony vocals on the album are sung by women. "I just thought that would be an interesting change from where I'd been before," Harrison says. "They make a great contribution — a different energy to have the sisters involved after a nine-year dude-fest."

Harrison's unerring melodic sense helps guide the album through its many experimental detours. As a lyricist, he derives a great deal of meaning from the sheer sound of words. He can make a title like "Back Seat Silver Jet Sighter" fit perfectly inside the melody. Or, on "Armitage Shanks," he can invest the phrase — the name of a British manufacturer of bathroom fixtures — with an uncommon ache. "Virginia Woolf said something about the music of words," he explains. "That it really was about the music first, and the content second. Because the two are very closely connected. You know, when children are in the womb, the little convolutions and development within the brain are completely reliant upon the sounds that they're hearing."

Like many songwriters, during the initial writing, Harrison says he finds that songs often just "fall into place." It's the next step that's crucial. "At some point I have to sit down and try to figure out what the song is about. ... My job as a writer is to be a detective and try to ascertain what is being said here and how I need to articulate it. That's the fun part, trying to be the detective."

(m_pelusi@citypaper.net)

Undertherock.blogspot.com is a nonstop dude-fest.

 

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