Pitchfork

"We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stomach. The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us through streets as rough and deep as the beds of torrents... on we raced, hurling watchdogs under doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like collars under a flatiron. Death, domesticated, met me at every turn, gracefully holding out a paw, or once in a while hunkering down, making velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle."

And that's just the translation from Italian. Almost overnight, F.T. Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism birthed a new art movement that reflected the modern tensions of the 20th century. His kinetic language stoked fires in the minds of young Italian men, disgruntled at the end of that first decade with an Italy lagging behind the rest of industrialized Europe. They painted, they wrote, and they raced cars, their works mixing and clashing with Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, and all the avant-garde movements of the era. They castigated museums, universities and other keepers of static culture, and their cult of masculinity and hedonism incited outraged riots, and nightmares in more than a few.

Ultimately, Futurism was a radical movement, and it mostly attracted radicals. It died out as an official ideology within a decade, but its impulse lives on in various forms. In music, the impulse can be heard in the works of musicians like Varese, Cage, Stockhausen, and in the public's scandalized reaction to jazz. Which gets me to thinking about today's popular indie bands, and how lazily we consider them to be cutting-edge-- why don't we demand as much as the Futurists did?

LU offer a partial answer to that question. On their self-titled debut they've recorded some of the best techno-futuristic rock instrumentals I've heard in a long time. They're direct descendants of the Krautrock sound, but please don't expect me to flourish the overused word "motorik" like I'm Joe Critic-- LU drummer Dan Searing does more than just chug monotonously. His crisp chops are complemented perfectly by bassist Kristaps Kreslin's minimalist style. And Matthew Dingee plays brilliantly, like he's compressed all the electronic quarks and pulsars from Tortoise's Standards into the strings of his guitar. It's one of the first releases for pulCec, a subsidiary of Darla Records founded by producer Trevor HollAnd. But don't worry, robot-rockers: all the synthesized handclaps and gyroscopic grooves come through loud and clear.

"Mood Elevator," the album's first track, propels forward with a bass drum and snare stamp-click-stamp-click as methodic as the driving bass. Then Dingee's guitar worms its way into the mix, building a gentle anthemic vibe. The label likens these guys to New Order, but only because the warmth of the melody is thrown into such stark contrast by the background's cold precision. Gears shift quickly for the second song, and the comparisons to Neu! all begin to make sense. "Biometric Authentication" exists somewhere between retro and futurism, with the bass pulse impersonating the sensors, and the sparse guitar knifing out fractal geometry that would make Michael Rother jealous.

Other song titles convey similar functionality. "Aquarium Furniture" drifts along on constant cymbals and a subaquatic bassline. Dingee's reverb pierces the depths with seductive grace, each wavering chord casting reflections through the medicated haze. "Hot Knives" pivots again on the rhythm section; the bass whirs and the drums multiply in skittering waves, evidence either of an electronic kit or Pro Tooling. The guitar jeers and lures with all the entente of Rush (yes, Rush), and the weird samples smirk like one of Toenut's rabid jams. And who can resist a ride on the new wave keyboards and funky bassline of "International Supercock?"

The two-word titles and the black-and-white of the bold LU font are just reflections of the band's binary structure. Each song becomes a perpetual motion machine, the rhythm section shifting in synchronous harmony through multiple motifs and time signatures. Of course, what they do isn't new-- you could replace every reference to "LU" in this review with "Trans Am," and it would still be pretty accurate. The Futurists probably wouldn't like LU after a few exposures-- they'd see how the band, like Trans Am, presents an image that's far more futuristic than the actual substance of their music.

But listen to how pretentious these guys were: "Let us now, as Futurists, enter one of these hospitals for anaemic sounds. There: the first bar brings the boredom of familiarity to your ear and anticipates the boredom of the bar to follow. Let us relish, from bar to bar, two or three varieties of genuine boredom, waiting all the while for the extraordinary sensation that never comes." Luigi Russolo wrote that in his manifesto, "The Art of Noises," pertaining to how they wanted to make music from samples of everyday city sounds. Yeah, elitism can be funny, but just as you can only listen to so many hours of Merzbow, you can only get off on liposuction sound-source albums for so long. And to think: all they'd need to do is wander down to D.C.'s Pharmacy Bar, owned by LU bassist Kristaps Kreslin, and play a few tracks from this album on the jukebox. They wouldn't have found the future they were seeking, but they'd have had their asses rocked, and maybe even gotten a free beer out of it.