It seems like a lifetime ago now, but listening to the newly remastered edition of Trans Am's Futureworld takes me right back to the wonderfully strange year of 1999. The end of The American Century was to be our last great party. The economy was booming, the Internet was still considered the wild West, and Millennium Fever was raging. It was the era of stained-blue dresses, boy bands, and a seemingly hopeless candidacy of Bush Jr., and not even the dreaded "Y2K Bug" was going to stop us from having a good time. Futureworld embodied all of this and more for me, and it remains a record I never tire of hearing.
A major reason for this is the fact that the album is not really of its time at all. From the primitive Tron-style graphics to the lo-fi electronic sounds, Trans Am were consciously evoking a retro-futurism. This was happening while Madonna was still trying to get her aging ass on the electronica bandwagon in the first place. Trans Am had already "been there, done that" long before the train left the station. Their vision of using the past to anticipate what lay ahead was genius, even if it had been borrowed from Kraftwerk.
The brief opening instrumental "1999" is a clear directive to check any preconceived notions at the door. Is that piercing sound a feedback-laden guitar? A would-be John Coltrane sax? Or just some masterfully manipulated keyboards? Who is to say it isn't all three? The point throughout Futureworld is that Trans Am wish above all to confound our expectations. Everything is filtered by key components that miraculously paralleled my favorite records. These include early Cure, the first Killing Joke album, and the drums of John Bonham, among many others.
The Kraftwerk influence is most notable on the title track, which features vocoder-processed vocals, and a melody not unlike that of “Neon Lights.” Where Trans Am differ from their German heroes is in their desire to retain the human element in their music. This is primarily accomplished with some powerful drumming, especially during “Television Eyes,” and the coda of “Futureworld.”
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