The Architectural Dance Society

I rarely narrow down my year’s favorites to name a singular Number One Record…but this year, one record stood out for me. And that’s Future Clouds & Radar’s Big Weather. I subscribe to leader Robert Harrison’s Patreon, so I’d heard these songs develop over the past couple of years…and while I felt they were solid tracks, as they came into final form and found themselves forming this record, I was pleasantly surprised that they were even better than I’d hoped. Following are notes on each track.

“Chicken Out”: Immediately we get a sense of some of the unexpected sonic juxtapositions we’ll experience. After a steady tom beat and some nicely corroded guitar, we hear…glockenspiel? (It’s actually glock with subtle backing of electric piano and tubular bells…) The verse enters, with one slightly unexpected chord, and nicely propulsive “strings” (synth) in the background. The prechorus takes us on a wild little tour of modulation (but one whose curves are guardrailed by the time-honored device of secondary dominants) on its way to the chorus…and then back to the introductory material leading to verse two. We add an e-bow guitar in the background, and a thicker vocal texture. This time the chorus repeats, after changing its last chord the first time through to facilitate the retransition. The e-bow guitar has been doubled, and we go into the bridge, featuring some shifting metrical accents and some nice lead guitar complementing the vocal. Then we get an e-bow guitar solo with some Frippian chordal arpeggiations. Another verse, another chorus, restate the opening, last chord: boom—classic song structure, perfectly done. The lyrics seem to feature a younger man, uncertain of an affair he’s having with a woman he calls “Gypsy” (a hint dontcha think?), living moment to moment but edging towards the notion of maybe making more of it…but he might…what’s the title? Or maybe not just taking it moment by moment is the “chickening out” he fears. There’s a certain grandeur to the arrangement—the bells, the strings, the e-bow guitars like some mutant woodwinds—which helps sell us subtly on the idea that as much as the situation of the song is kind of a rock cliché, the reason for that very fact is how common and real the situation is…and that deciding what chickening out is and is not is something we all end up needing to choose.

“Brass Tacks”: We open with a lurking bass and…marimba! The rhythm guitar (a dark acoustic, later doubled by a chunky electric) spells out a sort of Bondian (James, not Pam) descending chord sequence…and ooh, there’s a real nice touch of distortion on that marimba (okay…turns out it’s not a real marimba: in his Patreon, Robert Harrison is offering in-depth looks at the tracking of these songs: I’ve heard three of ‘em, and that’s one detail on this one). Consequently, there’s a sort of sixties feel here…something dark and tentative, yet a bit aggressive. The lyrics are delivered evenly, but they’re rather cryptic: “a liar alerts you to the cosmic electric hung jury”; “I broke into the roller rink with my jar of india ink.” Not exactly denying the sixties feel, I’ve gotta say. But there’s something insinuating in Harrison’s vocal delivery. There isn’t really a chorus—or the chorus is just the title line and then three different lines following. But they’re all threats of a sort: “Brass tacks…you’re caught in the act/ And all those chickens are down in the yard / I’m up in the boardroom showing my scars”…while subsequent iterations refer to “somebody getting the axe” and “when you come for the king, you better get the job done.” There’s also a wandering lead guitar outlining a single minor chord, disregarding that descending sequence, and ambling along in 3/4 time against the prevailing 4/4 rhythm. A subtle touch I don’t think I would have caught (if not for the track analysis on the Patreon): the bass on the chorus has a fatter, rounded sound, while on the verses, Harrison added a Fender VI bass: that’s the bass all over The White Album, grunting away on “Helter Skelter” and several other tracks. It’s not quite as aggressive here…but it definitely has more edge than the chorus bass. So what’s going on here overall? Not sure…it feels like a mood piece, but the mood is very 2025, a narrator who’s taking perverse pleasure in asserting his power over others, with implicit threats of violence.

“The Hype”: The opening features a unison riff, guitar and I think a fuzz bass, but in any event both instruments fuzzed out. And a Hammond organ in the background adding some gloomy depth. After the chorus some sort of distorted something that sounds like crossbreeding an electric guitar and a sax. That chorus is pretty simple, and pretty much gives the game away: “He [she] is addicted to the hype”…which is rhymed with “crack pipe.” There’s a nice slide guitar solo over a very curious progression: it’s a major flat-VI chord (in a major key), down to IV, down to major II, and cycling like that. Do I think Harrison thought of it like that? Nope: but I’m sure he realized, like I do, that it sounds cool, off-center, but rightly wrong. Funny thing, as I write these more or less in real time, occasionally stopping the track…I thought this was a brief song. But in fact, it’s the longest track of the first three at 4:05. Something to be said for moving along rapidly and keeping a riff going!

“The Man Who Would Be King”: Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds have a track called “There She Blows” in which one might say that Cotton Mather makes a cameo… (Translation from the overly clever: chord sequence seems heavily borrowed from “Homefront Cameo” by Cotton Mather). Knowing this fact makes the sound of this track pretty funny…because in fact it’s the best song Oasis never wrote. I suspect the “whaling/sailing” metaphor here might be borrowed from the Gallagher song as well. I mean, especially the line “there he blows” maybe? Anyway: some nice, crunchy rhythm guitar and a cool riff, then Harrison in a classic Beatlesque descending melody, snarkily allowing that he’s “so glad you still believe / heavy sits the crown of the king / even when you know your way around a melody.” The prechorus does a bit of harmonic lifting (for those of you scoring the game: I-III-IV-flatVI, all major), ending in a nicely Dylanesque bit of vocal phrasing: “First you gotta dream it, then you gotta feel it / If you don’t believe it, then you gotta heal it / And if you can’t…then I guess you gotta…steal it.”

“Cabbagetown”: You know how people say—often of songs they think of as “Beatlesque”—that if only people had heard them, they coulda been a big hit? Which disregards that “Beatlesque” songs really haven’t been hits much since…uh, Oasis? Anyway: this song—if only people hear it—could be a big country hit…if country wasn’t all about bros these days. Instead, on the surface, it’s a lost-love song, in which the narrator says he’s gonna have to “crawl back to her…all the way to Cabbagetown.” But there’s also some leavetaking, specifically with the narrator saying “remember when I said I didn’t wanna drink any more?” referring later to “celebrating” but that he “can’t afford another fall,” and that now he’s “cleaning up his act.” The instrumental section here is lovely: a lead electric, a slide guitar, and a fiddle, plus a fairly active set of rhythm parts…but it never sounds in the least bit cluttered. (There’s a back story to the writing of this one which Harrison lays out on his Patreon…I haven’t quite connected it to the surface story, but it involves his late brother, a Shakespeare scholar and poet, and Harrison writing most of this song in his head in the car on the way to a production of a friend’s play…which proved to be The Tempest, Shakespeare’s farewell… Right now, I’m only slightly glimpsing how the two (subconsciously) relate…but it’s a fascinating story of how songs emerge, and the way we often don’t know at first what the hell we’re really writing about.)

“Going to Meet the Big Man”: This might have been the first song nearly completed for this album—certainly it’s the one I most remember. It’s a haunting song, whose narrator would appear to be a struggling, desperate man, locked into his rural, small-town existence (“never been out past the county line before”…), making the fateful decision to “see the Big Man.” The music and words sketch this shadowy figure with clouds of dread, frankly. First, our narrator worries that “he hopes his family understands” his decision. He notes that he’s “spent his life on the outside, never had a golden ticket or a free ride”…and later, in a line supported by a wavering phantom of guitar, “I see my photo fading…outside, a black car’s waiting.” This “Big Man” promises much: “tonight he’s gonna raise the dead, lift the world above his head… Tonight he’s gonna make the deal, stop the clocks and break the wheel…” And why is our narrator doing this? “’Cause someone knows the way I feel…I’m talking about the Big Man.” It’s important that Harrison writes this in first person (and of course sings it): this is not reporting, looking at what someone else says or feels: this is inhabiting, trying to speak from and for the position of such a person. The most terrifying thing about the song (and it is that, for me) is that the narrator is NOT oblivious to the stakes: all those things the Big Man promises? They might be grand and impressive…but they’re also tremendously destructive. The narrator, in the end, doesn’t really care. As the man sang long ago, “when you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.” If you’d like, you can look at this song freed of time and place, and imagine yr usual Faustian bargain, with the usual party such bargains are entered into alongside. But it’s hard, in this time and place, not to put a name and a face to this force of destruction, this last desperate chance, this all-in gamble.

“The Copy Cat”: Not sure whether this is Harrison returning to the Oasis thing. I suppose one might think so (and the riff even seems sort of related to the one following the chorus of “The Man Who Would Be King”). But the lyrics here seem a little less disgusted and lot more amused: “Creeping through my house, caught him in my smoking jacket, with a blues harp in his mouth, trying to figure ‘Hound Dog’ out.” As the song goes along, its texture develops layers, guitars morphing a bit like taffy, until an instrumental break features…two slightly distorted electric guitars (thanks, Mike and Viv!)…and once we emerge, we have a restatement of the verse, where the earlier, fairly straightforward arrangement is replaced by a distant, heavily compressed piano, pizzicato strings, and some sort of hand drum, while the vocals blearily peak out from behind slightly lysergic shades. More and more colors emerge, including a duskily cantilated vocal passage, first sung (I think) then replayed as altered sample (I think)… In the end, Harrison dismisses his “copy cat”’s efforts: “You’ll need a better fake ID to tell the world that you are me” and finally, bemusedly, “love you dearly…nowhere near me.”

One thing I’ve always loved about Harrison’s music (which his Patreon track studies bear out) is the combination of careful craft (the kind of ears that hear the need for two entirely different bass guitars in “Brass Tacks,” say…and the close listening required to suss that out) and a spirit willing to just wing it and leave things be (vocal tracks flown in from the initial demo, doubling lines that are rather loose but serve the spirit…or even just the open approach to arrangement that sees everything from strings to synths to marimbas thrown in unexpectedly but winningly). These tracks didn’t start as “Future Clouds & Radar”—I’m not sure whether Harrison intended them for a second solo record or as a new Cotton Mather record—but somewhere along the way he realized that the free approach to arrangement and production he was using was much closer to the sprawling FC&R approach than to the (slightly) more controlled Cotton Mather sound.

There are a handful of other tracks Harrison previewed at his Patreon which are not on this long EP/short LP (28:34) which could have fit, in the sense that they’re just as good…but I realized, in trying to put together a hypothetical track sequence including them, that because a number of them are on the slower side, their inclusion would have changed the character of this record. I think “Going to Meet the Big Man” and “Cabbagetown” are the slowest tracks here…and “Big Man” is hardly relaxing, while “Cabbagetown” isn’t all that slow! Nothing rockets along like “Church of Wilson” from Cotton Mather’s Kon Tiki (although “The Hype” comes close) but overall the feel here is solid rock songs. Those other tracks might have tilted the record a little closer to “sensitive songwriter” (which Harrison is, also)…but that’s more what his solo album showcased.

Hopefully those tracks (and newer ones yet unwritten) will show up in some form, someday (although sometimes, the time for a song passes: hey, future box set material!).

Anyway: if you’ve ever enjoyed any Cotton Mather, Future Clouds & Radar, or indeed Harrison’s solo record, I think this one can’t miss.