album review: 'give me the future' by bastille

I was not planning on making this a solo review, but I think it’s fair to say that I was expecting nothing with this album.

And I mean, can you blame me? Why would I expect anything from Bastille in 2022? After a few promising moments on their debut and a few songs I do like even if I think they’ve aged in weird ways, Bastille has had all of the self-serious importance of a band with higher conceptual ambitions and so little in the execution to back it up, which has mostly led to their albums being sloppily produced and tedious, more often forgotten than disliked. And unsurprisingly, none of my reviews of their work have been all that popular, and I get why: they’ve got a (mostly) unique sound and a lot of earnestness and writing that at least seems to glance at higher concepts, which can be enough to pull in a silent majority audience; hell, that’s how they initially won me over. But the deeper I’ve gone into their catalog - especially their follow-up projects after Bad Blood in 2016 and 2019 - the less I’ve been impressed, with production feeling increasingly colourless and the writing never grasping the nuances of framing and subtext that might take them to a deeper place. The better word - and I’m loathe to use it unless I mean it - is pretentious, implying a lot more thematic depth than they can back up, but to their credit it never felt disingenuous or coming from a bad place, which meant their material was more dull than aggravating.

And that was what I was expecting to happen with Give Me The Future, just Bastille sinking further into the quagmire of commercialcore, where they’d have lofty thematic statements but little in the sound to support it - I mean come on, their last big hit stateside was ‘Happier’ with Marshmello, if you want a way to guarantee my expectations were rock bottom, that would be it, to the point I was prepared to just put this in On The Pulse and call it a day, save myself the grief…

And yet I don’t think I could have predicted this. Folks, this is something special: the sort of disaster that’s fun to talk about and where I’m not even mad I’m reviewing it, a project somewhere in between Muse’s Simulation Theory, The 1975’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, and maybe a dash of Billy Idol’s long-forgotten disaster of an album Cyberpunk, the sort of sci-fi splatter painting where you might grasp on the surface the quasi-dystopian exploration that Bastille is attempting, but the end result cannot help but have me laughing hysterically… at least until I untangled it further and realized not only did I have way too much to say, but that this tested my patience in ways I didn’t expect.

And what I find fascinating is that this had potential: once again the band kept their production crew in-house, they’ve had conceptual experiments before, and Bastille has always been a deeply uncool and profoundly earnest band - or at least that was the emotional throughline that Dan Smith could best sell - so a sci-fi dystopian epic is not far afield, and you can tell Dan Smith is trying his hardest with this. Yeah, the vocoders are a new addition, but not a bad one: given Dan Smith can be a little limited as an expressive singer, I don’t mind adding effects to amplify a personality, especially if he keeps the rich well of backing vocals behind him. But there are three major problems that characterize Give Me The Future, and the first being that I’m just not sure there’s enough even here to earn the qualifier of ‘epic’ - it’s barely over a half hour, the shortest Bastille album to date, and three of the thirteen songs are interludes, creating more the impression of pop songs drenched in sci-fi iconography rather than creating a narrative. And that’s not counting songs like ‘Thelma & Louise’ and ‘Shut Off The Lights’ and ‘Club 57’ that fly off on wild tangents that only barely connect to any themes here!

That takes us to the writing… and I’ll give Bastille this, on the surface the theme isn’t bad, creating an escapist, quasi-VR concept called ‘Futurescape’ that uses modern flashy tech branding and may be alternative reality but also could have some elements of mind control as well. Okay, there’s the seeds of something here, especially if you want to make comment on how algorithms help shape human behaviour or how technocrats operate within late capitalism, you’ve got plenty of runway if you want to tell a dystopian story. But ever since the beginning, Bastille has had an issue of throwing words and references into a song and hoping that the vague idea will materialize out of it, and where on previous projects it felt needlessly obtuse or just underwritten, here it’s hard to escape how the pile-up of references are more for their own sake rather than feeding into any connective tissue or synergy within the song - the Ready Player One influence is flagrant, and that’s not a good thing. And here, it goes right past incoherent and right into hilarious, made all the funnier because Dan Smith is selling it as if he’s not aware of how stupid it’s all becoming. For instance, putting a tenuous reference to ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ in a song called ‘Thelma & Louise’ barely makes sense and the implied gender politics of that make my head spin, or the pileup of half-formed dystopian references on ‘Back To The Future’ where the message seems closer to ‘leaving within this futuristic dream world is fucking rad, who cares about any of the political implications of referencing 1984, Brave New World, or especially Blade Runner in the stupidest way possible’! Which later is echoed on ‘Stay Awake’ with its bizarre Total Recall reference, and the title track with its out of context Phillip K. Dick reference - dreaming of electric sheep is a reference to the questions of empathy and holding a mirror to the human experience and questioning whether we’re diminished in contrast, which doesn’t really work on a song centered around its ravenous desire for more even if it is all ‘fake’, which in the context of the album has been just dandy, and gets amplified to an absurd degree on ‘Plug In…’ where even if there’s fragments of that existential dread with deepfakes and shallow celebrity obsession and references to old white billionaires wanting to go to Mars, it plays second fiddle to Dan Smith singing about wanting to fuck a robot!

So once again, the framing makes a Bastille album thematically incoherent, what else is new - but worse still is the thematic payoff. Because there’s nothing inherently wrong with emotional escapism in cyberspace and the creeping feeling that it’s not truly satisfying, but ending it with a track where the throughline is ‘well, who cares what the future holds, I have you’ feels painfully off in a bewildering way. Not only does it completely mishandle all of that sci-fi dystopian subtext which doesn’t nearly go examined as deeply as it should, the arc to finding ‘real connection’ doesn’t fit the intended futurism unless he’s talking to the fucking robot! If I’m going to be generous, it maybe pays off what Riz Ahmed provided on that mostly embarrassing spoken word interlude on ‘Promises’ - using the word ‘gonads’ as a central point of rhyming has me burst out laughing every time, this is where clunky poetry kills your atmosphere in the same way the ‘Blade Run-run’ reference did on ‘Back To The Future’. But more to the point, it feels incredibly trite to say we’re not denying all the horrible things we’re trying to escape, to quote Ahmed again we’re neither ‘evil nor ostrich’ - it’s not like we can change the future anyway - we just care more about this undercooked connection we’ve been gesturing vaguely at the entire album! This is a running theme I can’t stand with a lot of records that touch on dystopian themes - Lana Del Rey’s Lust For Life springs to mind - but the bigger problem is that this is an emotional payoff that doesn’t match the arc of the album, the individualist but generally undercooked dystopian escapism leading into a communal ‘well, I’ll get over all of those vaguely defined nightmares I’m trying to escape so long as I have you’ doesn’t pay off outside of songs that barely fit with the sci-fi theme anyway. ‘Thelma & Louise’ kind of goes for the sisterhood connection - doesn’t remotely match the tone or vibe of the movie - and I guess ‘Shut Off The Lights’ and ‘Club 57’ go to the generic ‘find love/attention the dance floor’ - but these moments feel both stylistically and emotionally in their own space outside of the sci-fi, so ending the album trying to resolve them instead seems like a complete misstep… albeit not a surprising one, because paying off the dystopian side properly would involve engaging with the actual text, which tends to be way more revolutionary that Bastille will ever be, especially as they seem to want us to join them in the metaverse! Yeah, that’s a partnership that exists and given this album, makes a depressing amount of sense - given how often you reference dystopias of course you’re going to team up with Facebook!

But what about the music, if the songs are good that’ll help, right? Well, I’ll give Bastille this, it’s probably their most eclectic project to date in terms of slamming synthpop, 80s new wave, vocoders, ornate strings passages, and a shocking amount of dated, blown-out Kanye-isms from the late 2000s into their regular bombast, and that does help a few hooks stand out a little more - I can at least remember a few more hooks here and I haven’t said that about a Bastille album in a long time. But this is where the abbreviated nature of a lot of these songs and the album’s shockingly short runtime makes me think that all the cinematic bombast crammed into a few songs isn’t making the most of any of it, but what surprises me more is how apparently Smith and his producers learned none of the lessons from that era of Kanye’s production! Why is the percussion so clunky and the vocoder passages damn near clipping a mix that feels mastered for volume rather than any sense of dynamic range? Why have such heavy programmed percussion if you’re not going to use the full mix to give the sound proper impact, especially when you try to match it with a fat bassline on ‘Thelma & Louise’ that has a lot less groove than you’d expect, or the flailing but stiff attempt at gospel on ‘Future Holds’ with its godawful guitar and synth tones? Why do all the handclaps sound painfully fake? Why do all the strings passages sound so clear and elegant with all of that proper space that you’re not affording to the rest of the instruments, where the clash becomes painfully obvious on songs like ‘Plug In…’ with such a swampy low end? Why go for the bouncy Paul Simon’s Graceland homage on ‘Shut Off The Lights’ that sounds imported right out of the late 80s and it winds up easily one of the most fun moments on the entire album… well, guess that question answered itself, but why not double down on it? Why instead brick out every melodic guitar and synth tone on ‘Stay Awake’, or go for the sort of overcompressed clunker you’d hear on an Imagine Dragons album with the title track? Actually, here’s the big question, why is this album compressed like it’s a casualty of the loudness war from the 2000s? You’d think for an album trying to sound cinematic and high concept, you’d go for broke in the production and make it feel huge - I guess with the shorter song structures they might be prioritizing immediacy, but wow, if there was a place and time to go for broke, it was here.

And you know, there was a part of me that the first three or four times I heard this album… it was bad, but it was funny, the writing went right past parody, and this could be the sort of project you’d throw on for a laugh; hell, if there are critics who buy into the shallow escapist fun of it all, at least I would get that. But the more listens I gave it, the less funny it was, be it the godawful production, the thematic incoherence, the pretentiousness to make vague gestures at a half-formed concept but then completely chicken out when it comes to landing it, and the bombast and earnestness began seriously losing its flavour. It’s pretty much a disaster, but a compromised one that doesn’t even have the stones to embrace the excess or cheese, because that might actually push away those corporate connections who gets antsy if called out, and that makes it so much worse. I’d say listen to it if you wanted a laugh, but… honestly, we all could do so much better. Let’s not be given the future - let’s take it for ourselves, and leave Bastille behind.