Trans Am: Futureworld

Trans Am's live performances have always been invigorating, but on record, the band's mix of electronic music and hard rock has been jarringly hit-or-miss. One of the group's biggest problems has been fairly simple: Trans Am just doesn't write songs. Live, the trio's old-school electro workouts are good fun, and the more aggressive, guitar-oriented material is enhanced by Trans Am's cheesy hard-rock poses. But as the group's most recent album, The Surveillance, showed, the plodding riffs and synthetic drumbeats don't always cohere, and that album was a flat, directionless bore. Futureworld, on the other hand, may be Trans Am's best work yet, and this time the band clearly has a direction: the future! Not only do the music's disparate elements come together naturally, but Trans Am has actually written songs you can hum—and some songs even feature vocals. But lest Futureworld sound mundane, Trans Am has retained its edge nicely. The band processes its singing through a vocoder, a robotic effect enhanced by Sebastian Thompson's vaguely motorik assault, and "Television Eyes" and "Futureworld" match minimal melodies with raw arrangements. Another advance is "Cocaine Computer," an electro number that's actually funky, perhaps a first for an indie-rock band. For all its man/machine technobabble, Kraftwerk was a computer group first and foremost. With Futureworld, Trans Am finally attains a techno-rock, man/machine ideal, and then actually does something with it.