Ned Collette
Future Suture
9 Track, LP (2007, Dot Dash)
Related: Ned Collette.
I’m not sure, yet, what exactly Ned Collette is on about with Future Suture, and maybe he isn’t quite sure either. The lyrics sound like fragments from a weary traveller’s diary – bad dreams, caustic observations, a desire to go home without knowing where home might be – the music similarly downbeat. Where Jokes and Trials shone like a wet road after rain, Future Suture is listless, as if it had been trodden beneath a coating of dust. That’s not to say that it’s dull – anything but – only that it makes for hard listening. Ned’s embittered baritone is the album’s focal point, pulling the listener through a series of dense, curiously unmelodic arrangements.
Despite the finger-plucked acoustic guitar and touches of the vintage organs that characterised his debut, there’s no folkish joie di vivre to be found here. Not that there was ever much, but if Jokes and Trials was melancholic, the sound of painful self-reflection, then Future Suture could be subtitled Ned Vs the World. And the world appears to be winning, leaving sour trumpets and limping tempos in its wake. Check ‘Winter Holiday’, which devolves from a murmured first person narrative into a soundscape of skittering cymbals and spooked guitar squeaks, or the following ‘Ned’s Dream’, where “America/What rotten core” is fingered as the (sickly) heart of the problem. It’s one of the album’s few moments of clarity, but then churning violins and a lyric that won’t let up – either in pace or detail – conspire to bring the clouds back over again.
The fact that Future Suture is both tired and tiring is, perversely, its very strength. This is a difficult, perplexing, but above all honest album, and for all those reasons and more it’s worth the hearing.
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