The Minders
The Future's Always Perfect (Future Farmer)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Summer 2004

With the off-kilter mixed-gender harmonies and playful pop drive of The Future’s Always Perfect, the Minders suggest what might happen if Chris Knox joined Mates of State. Martyn Leaper’s pinched, vaguely British delivery in songs like “Tearaway” and “Go Wave Your Wand” sounds in equal parts like Knox and Lou Barlow, while Rebecca Cole’s slight but appealing voice occasionally recalls a blank-eyed Claudia Gonson. The individual tunes, which come across like the work of a mellow, mid-fi New Pornographers, are nifty enough, but The Future’s Always Perfect suffers from a curious lack of momentum, with each song existing on its own without really flowing into or connecting with any of the others. Worse yet, it sort of tapers off well before the end (somewhere around the odd-time-signatured “28X,” which sounds like it could have been recorded in 1981, or possibly by Elastica), which is a serious problem for an album that doesn’t even break the half-hour mark.

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