FUTURE USSES- ‘An Existential Haunting’
If the fact that Future Usses feature current and former members of Intronaut, Mouth of the Architect, and Bereft isn’t enough to prick your ears then you should know that ‘An Existential Haunting’ is the best thing any of them have ever done. Opener ‘What Is Anything’ is cinematic and powerful post-rock, 11 minutes long, taking in booming doom, blast furnace bass and electronic flourishes, but it both breezes by and makes a killer impact, ‘Make Flowers’ is the sound of some cult having a shared dream and collective nightmare at the same time, and the title track is a memorable, mournful desert rumble. Future Usses get as heavy as you’d expect then, but their true trump card is how beautiful this sounds- there are soaring space rock passages, deep chants and alien mantras (the only vocals here), and in other places it positively shimmers. A deep and rewarding, genre-defying, dizzyingly brilliant record that deserves to be considered one of the best of the year.
