the sort of gem you expect from a band hailing from Athens." -- Austin Town Hall
"The newly formed supergroup have an inviting personality to their music, spiraling through multiple genres and moods with taste." -- New Noise Magazine
"The album is awash with beautifully developed songs...delivered by some very talented musicians and vocalists." -- Bee Hive Candy
King of Prussia songwriter Brandon Taj Hanick wasn’t planning to stop. He had been living out of a suitcase, traveling around the U.S. & Europe for 9 months -- wandering; visiting old haunts with old friends in his old towns; recording and then touring in support of the band’s critically acclaimed 2014 double album Zonian Girls...And The Echoes that Surround Us All (Minty Fresh Records); making a mobile album and producing the guerrilla-style, award-winning music road trip documentary Poster Boys or: The Art of Mobile Recording. To pay the bills, Hanick worked writing ACT Test questions remotely and peddling Animal House & Audrey Hepburn posters to dorm-dwelling students. She said, “Come on back to Georgia, and I’ll be here!” And he had to go. And he had to stay. And now they’re reveling in the early years of marriage together in Athens, where it all began for pysch poppers King of Prussia “all those years ago.”
The Athenians are a little older, more responsible, maybe; the door guy became the bartender, the bartender became the owner. Like Athens, the “highly literate” songwriting that Hanick has become known for has also aged like a fine, young cannibal, calling to mind the narrative, visual lyrics of Young, Cohen and Merritt. Future Lives’ Mansions sounds like Athens -- the autumnal twang of Buffalo Springfield steeped in a psychedelic Elephant 6 summer. Mansions doesn’t take time for granted. It’s the warm excitement of a new, deep love. “The Knowing.” Seeing the world and watching fire fill city squares. Exploring the space/time continuum at a street fair in a dream. Dealing with death, because it’s inevitable. And it’s the end. But it’s not. There are spirited elements throughout the songs, which vacillate between California Country and Liverpudlian Indie Pop. At the heart of the songs is love. There are lines about finding God and then wondering which God was found. When Future Lives delves into gospel on songs like “Continental Drift Divide,” Hanick opines over of finely spun hymnal harmonies, “You must be a sign from God/And you could still be a vision of Vishnu or ‘The Eye’/And you’re by my side.”
Fourteen people played in Mansions, but the heart of Future Lives is six major dude(tte)s. Hanick sings, plays guitars and orchestrates what Flagpole Magazine calls “a veritable supergroup.” Ex-Drive By Trucker John Neff bends his pedal steel lines like sine waves etching hummable tunes into the brain. Memphis-bred Sarah Robbins stax layers of rich, crystal-clear vocal harmonies that would sound at home on a Staple Singers record. In addition to arranging the vocals with Smile-esque wonder, Sarah’s big bro Nick Robbins (Velveteen Pink) brings musical inventiveness to his complex, but tasteful, drum parts. Patrick Burke (ex-Giving Tree Band), whose Lynchian flow and precision on bass buoys the jams, isn’t shy about picking out a lead guitar part that David Crosby would twirl his moustache to. Cameron Steuart’s string parts are as cinematic as they are down-home; as much canvas as they are ether. The arrangements are dense, but the expert mixing ears and of John Keane (R.E.M., Vic Chesnutt, 10,000 Maniacs) ensure that every part breathes. In some ways, Hanick’s new songs are a return to the primal. In others, he’s in search of the Divine. Listening to songs like the Petty-esque “California Vibe” -- which speak of the pitfalls of hyper-consumerism, “our true connection with God” and not being “too fu**ed up” by past injustices -- it’s unclear if Hanick ever finds complete peace in the universe on Mansions. What is clear from Future Lives’ debut, though, is that songs so full of love and meditative reverie can only come from a man who has stopped wandering.
07/04/2024
