Juno - A Future Lived In Past Tense flac mp3 download

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Can you ever have too much good music? Ask Juno, and they'd certainly say no. After all, their new album, A Future Lived in Past Tense, is close to 70 minutes long, with quite a few tracks ranging between seven and ten minutes in length. There aren't many bands that can pull this off, but Juno proved on their 1999 debut, This is the Way It Goes and Goes and Goes, that they're capable of crafting highly intriguing compositions over extended periods of time. That record was a masterpiece of soaring guitar rock, and not a note of it was wasted. But a few listens to this sophomore effort should give an indication of just how thin the line between "trance-inducing" and "sleep-inducing" can be. This isn't to say that the entirety of A Future Lived in Past Tense is boring; it's not, and fans of the first Juno album should find much to love here. Examples: after a keyboard-driven opening instrumental, the band kicks it into high gear with "Covered with Hair," a whirlwind assault of the band's distinctive three-guitar sound with frontman Arlie Carstens' expressive, angstful vocals evening things out. "Help is On the Way" takes a slightly more laidback approach, with repetitive, twanging guitars and a steady, thumping punk beat. Juno have definitely calmed since their debut, as "The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow" will attest. A slow number with tinkling piano and a shuffled beat under the wintry atmosphere of hushed vocals and melodic guitars, it's easily one of the gentler track in the band's catalog. If the rest of the album sounded like this, it's doubtful anybody would complain about Juno's newfound quietude. However, "The French Letter" takes the sobriety to a new level, as the song takes nearly seven minutes to build to a climax. Shambling percussion and slow, strummed guitars plod lifelessly, obviously in no hurry to get anywhere. When the song finally gets around to exploding, the result is admittedly rousing. Still, the average American spends over five years of their life waiting in traffic; do we really need our music to replicate this experience? More successful is the 9+ minute "We Slept in Rented Rooms," which features great lyrics like, "We used each like axes/ To cut down the ones we really love." Carstens' confessionals are layered over delicate, interweaving guitars and a complex beat, holding attention by incorporating just enough melodic shifts and yelled vocals to temporarily lift the somber mood. "Things Gone and Things Still Here," on the other hand, is a long-winded spoken word narrative whose sparse musical backing remains almost completely static throughout its 8xBD minute length. Carstens' creative lyrics imagine a close friend as she might be at the age of 73, reading over their old correspondence. But lyrical bright spots aside, the music here has little to recommend-- even the band's powerhouse guitars are absent. Fortunately, A Future Lived in Past Tense's last two proper songs, "Killing It in a Quiet Way" and "You Are the Beautiful Conductor of This Orchestra" (yeah, the titles are pretentious-- deal with it) pick up the pace with more of the blistering post-punk that made Juno's debut such a kick-ass record. As with many long albums, A Future could have benefited greatly from a shorter running time and some better sequencing-- for instance, any sequencing that didn't cram the three longest songs into tracks 6, 8, and 9. But regardless of these flaws, Juno delivers a fairly strong album, particularly the first half. The songs that manage to rock as hard as This is the Way's best moments uphold that record's legacy, even with bassist Travis Saunders supplanted by interim replacements Nick Harmer of Death Cab for Cutie and Nate Mendel of the Foo Fighters. The more solemn tracks... eh, they're mostly okay. So, to answer my own question, can you have too much good music? Definitely not; if Juno had delivered 70 minutes of quality along the lines of "The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow" or "Help is on the Way," you wouldn't be putting up with my bitching right now. But can you have too much mediocre music? Yeah. Hell, yeah.