FUTURE MEMORIES

ST 37 are an interesting American band with a clear psychedelic tendency; they have been around since the eighties, have released several albums and have worked with several great musicians, as well as creating music for Fritz Lang' films. In 2005 ST 37 (Scott Telles, Dave Cameron and Joel Crucher) decided to released a compilation album featuring some of their earlier stuff which was not included in the past studio albums, so in "Future Memories" you will find rarities (b-sides, whatever you want to call them) and also unreleased material. So it is a nice chance to know a bit of the band's historical context.

This album consists of fifteen songs and a total time of 70 minutes; most of the tracks go around the 4-5 minutes mark, however there are a couple of longer ones. Since the first moments you will appreciate that psychedelic and maybe raw sound in their music, so you can make an idea of what you will listen in this album.

The vocals are not really my favorite, they sound crazy and in moments annoying, in "Sucking on the Family Tit" you will understand what I mean, though it is important to say that those vocals are not in the entire album. Then, if you listen to the third track, "Merlin Olsen's crippled mystical benefactor" you will find a completely different sound, more experimental and electronic.

I would assume that bands such as Hawkwind or even Sonic Youth may have been an influence for ST 37, and I can tell it by the sound of some songs like "Look at Yr Chair" or "Taboo Down Under". In "Orgasmatron" there are female vocals, that this time reminded me of Stereolab. There is a fast and predominant sound all over the album, giving that sense of excitation and psychedelia, the guitar work is pretty cool, and the bass always gives that necessary punch in order to create a stronger sound, the instrumental "Speed of Life" could be a good example of it.

"Eating Dirt" is without a doubt one of my favorite moments on this album, because the song gradually progresses, starting a bit slow but finishing strong and faster, while the seconds pass the music catches your mind and thoughts, so once you are in, you cannot escape until the music finishes. On the other hand, one of the longer songs, entitled "Should I get my own friends? a whole new Ballgame", fails in that goal, I mean, that slow and experimental song never caught my attention, actually I felt distracted in several occasions.

There are moments where I feel the album lacks of continuity, some changes that break the line and made me feel distracted, however, there are also pretty cool moments here, where one can appreciate the musician's skills and great compositions. Overall, I would say this album is recommendable for those who are not familiar with the band, so here you can have some hints of their music, though I believe it is not necessarily better to start with a compilation one. My final grade will be three stars.

Enjoy it!

Coming from the vault of one the United States' most traveled neo-psychedelic groups, 'Future Memories' was described to me as being a compilation of some of the band's historical material; due to the fact that this music doesn't seem to be on any studio album by psych ensemble ST 37, I'm guessing this can be best measured as a b-sides collection. Coming across as a garage rock hybrid of space rock innovators Hawkwind, ST 37 definately has an interesting sound for them, to say the least. However, at least as far as this compilation shows, the band still sounds greatly like the masters they first emulated as a tribute band when they first started. While the band gets the trippy, noisy atmosphere down right however, there are some very fatal flaws in the way the music is both written and executed (at least to the extent of this compilation) that really deter from the overall enjoyment of the piece.

While the fact that the sound is incredibly Hawkwind derivative may turn off some listeners that want a purely original experience, ST 37 does make themselves unique with their very lo-fi and garage-style production sound. While the very raw nature of the mix does work well for the more energetic sections of the music, the loose jams and ambient work here seems to suffer greatly from the lack of aural depth caused by the production. On top of that, while alot of the performance techniques here (such as ridiculously strained vocal work) are obviously meant for the sake of a quirky vibe, there is a sense of disappointment in how blatantly raw and unpolished the whole product is.

The biggest shame in all of this is that ST 37 is evidently a very talented and tight act. However, despite the band having some good chemistry with each other, it feels that a little more structured work have done wonders for this particular case, as it's clear that the spacy soundscapes don't work quite as well in lo-fi as the band might hope.