Send "Future Of The Left " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Avclub |
 Bands that traffic in anger tend to get bogged down in humorless self-righteousness, particularly in that soggy blob of a genre known as “post-hardcore.” That’s because most frontmen aren’t half as smart or funny as McLusky veteran Andy Falkous, the caustic wit who these days spits his sardonic worldview on the sizzling hot rock of Future Of The Left. Making good on the only slightly veiled threats of Curses, the new Travels With Myself And Another finds Falkous’ barbed stories—of fruitless sex, godless existence, and other pointless-yet-unavoidable bullshit—stretched wire-taut, with nary a moment of wasted energy. “Arming Eritrea” sets and immediately detonates the charge, with Falkous screaming his vocal chords into sinewy tatters over the sort of blistering metallic churn that keeps Steve Albini in fancy microphones. The giddily nihilistic “The Hope That House Built” sails on a yo-ho-ho sea-chanty rhythm, with Falkous snarking through one line after another like “Re-imagine God as just a mental illness.” Expounding on its usual pointed, piss-and-vinegar formula, the band even allows a few pretty harmonies on “Throwing Bricks At Trains,” throws the world’s bitterest dance party on “I Am Civil Service,” and turns the heavy-metal sing-along ironically inward with the punishing “You Need Satan More Than He Needs You.” That’s the kind of righteousness we need more of....full text |
| Drownedinsound |
| It’s all about control for Andy Falkous. Rage is the driving force behind his music, and as leader of Future Of The Left and mclusky, his voice has spewed bilious words over torrents of fierce lo-fi rock for over a decade. In both of these bands, Falco’s fury has been contained by psychopathically tight instrumentation, masked by caustic wit, and tempered by a tongue planted so deeply in his cheek it’s practically boring through to the other side. Smartass stage banter and carefully bitter blogs are intrinsic parts of FOTL’s appeal for the converted, but they’ve often seemed to distance the band from a bigger audience by making themselves easy to not take seriously. On Travels With Myself And Another FOTL have abandoned the last vestiges of daftness, and announced themselves as a band to wholeheartedly cherish. This record obliterates the footnote ‘post-mclusky’....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| Mclusky’s first two records were antidotes to everything twee about indie rock in the early ’00s. Packed with biliousness and hilariously over-the-top spite, they were manna to a particular milieu: the male cynic, the angry and backwardly rockist, and the people too irony-damaged to get with the program. I hear Christgau tut-tutting as I write this paragraph. I imagine him looking up at the positive rating and shaking his head. Goddamn that guy. Anyway, you get the impression Andy Falkous started to feel strangled by that appointed role, because his next two — Mclusky’s finale, and Future of the Left’s debut — swap rage for grit and personal gripes for a wider, more encompassing vision of all that’s fucked. And while both suffered from significant snags (failed experiments and filler, respectively), it’s now clear that this arc was headed somewhere after all. Travels With Myself and Another is the best thing this crew has ever made. It’s got all you could ask for: hooks, riffs, volume, wordplay, razor-sharp absurdity, and Jack Egglestone’s incomparable power drumming. Hell, there’s no reason to neglect bassist Kelson Mathias either, whose metallic complexity pushes Future of the Left out of punk rock’s comfort zone and into someplace freer and a lot more overtly musical....full text |
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