Future Clouds and Radar, Peoria

In my book, Austin’s Cotton Mather were one of the most sadly underrated bands of the late ’90s; while good-but-not-great people like Fastball got the hype and the spotlight, Robert Harrison and company’s absolute gem of a magnum opus, Kon Tiki, languished in obscurity. And that still feels downright criminal to me, given that the album was so good that for a long time it was (and sometimes still is) the benchmark by which I judged all subsequent pop albums, and a lot of the judge-es didn’t measure up. I never got to see them live, but that almost made the band’s mystique better — they were just these eccentric, immensely talented, Beatles-obsessed geniuses who lived somewhere up in the Hill Country and put out brilliant albums on totally obscure record labels that only critics like me ever truly loved.

Actual reality aside (I suspect that the band did have a fair number of devoted fans up in A-town, and likely elsewhere, to boot), the above’s why Peoria, the latest full-length from ex-Cotton Mather frontman Robert Harrison’s new band, Future Clouds and Radar, has had me so conflicted for the past few months.

First of all, it is good, with scattered moments of full-on brilliance — the beautiful falsetto in “Old Edmund Ruffin” and the slipping-downwards guitar in the break on “Mummified,” for two — those crystalline Beatles-derived melodies are in full feather, Harrison’s still McCartney-ish vocals (to my ears, anyway) sound even better, more refined and controlled, than ever, and the guy’s lyricism always makes me shake my head in wonder. I mean, I’ve got to hand it to anybody who can make me Wikipedia the titular subject (sort of) of a song like Harrison did after I first listened to “Old Edmund Ruffin” (handy factoid: Ruffin was one of the leaders of the pre-Civil War secessionist movement in the South and claimed to have fired the first shot of the war at Fort Sumter).

Where Harrison’s work with his old band was desperate and strange, however, feeling like the band was trying to pack the energy of a twelve-minute epic into traditional pop-song length, Future Clouds and Radar come off languid and sleepy, with too many pointless excursions into aimless psychedelia. Take “Mummified,” probably the worst offender on Peoria, as an example. The track is gorgeous and weirdly sweet, like a love song from one dessicated corpse to another pretty much has to be by default, with a brittle, delicate feel to it that works.

But then, at about 4:30, the song staggers off into self-indulgent, meandering piano, alien atmospheric noises, and guitar scrapes, and the whole ensemble loses the plot completely for the remaining three minutes of the track. Had Harrison cut things off when they started to go south, “Mummified” could have been a great song, but at its full length, it’s instead overlong, pointless, and confused, a decent pop song derailed by the band screwing around in the studio. And the sad part is that Harrison knows better; he’s proven that, both with Cotton Mather and elsewhere on this album.

Even on the best track here, “The Epcot View,” the pace is slow and methodical, and I hate to say it, but it makes the song drag. It’s still good, yes, and I’ve had bits and pieces stuck in my brain for a while now, which demonstrates that Harrison definitely knows his way around a hook, but the fiery, wide-eyed frenzy that made his other work truly sing is missing. The music just drifts, anchor-less, in an almost Floyd-ian psych-pop haze.

Things amp up only once, for “Eighteen Months,” which is faster, closer kin to modern Britpop than the Beatles, and which incorporates Matthew Sweet-esque (okay, Robert Quine-esque) raveup guitars and handclaps; a coherent, sharp-edged pop-rock blast that never outstays its welcome, it’s a stark contrast to both the songs before and after.

Of course, while I’m a fan of his old stuff, I can’t fault Harrison for wanting to take a bit of a different direction this time out; it just doesn’t work all that well for me. Good? Yes. Great? For my part, I think I prefer the Lennon/McCartney side of his British psychedelia obsession to the Gilmour/Waters.