Timber Timbre - Sincerely, Future Pollution

‘Sewer Blues’, ‘Western Questions’, ‘Sincerely, Future Pollution’. Just looking at some of the track titles on Timber Timbre’s fourth record, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that this is a grubbier, dirtier, more overtly socially-conscious album than their Polaris Prize-nominated album ‘Hot Dreams’. Even Taylor Kirk himself admits that “2016 was a difficult time to observe”, and those feelings of unease have spilled over into the band’s music.

From this disquiet though, Timber Timbre have crafted possibly their most considered album, with the band working closely together to create a very particular sound. Ironically, what’s been born from that more measured approach is also probably the band’s most chaotic album, where the listener is being constantly surprised by tonal shifts and anomalous sounds. The twinkling synths of opening track ‘Velvet Gloves & Spit’ are far removed from the sharp staccato melodies of ‘Grifting’, which lie underneath Taylor’s drifting, poetic, almost spoken word performance. Instrumental ‘Skin Tone’ provides yet another curveball, with funk-laden bass grooves sitting alongside cosmic waves of vintage electronica.

These tracks, despite being pretty different to one another, are at least relatively consistent in tone and genre. That’s certainly not the case for the majority of the album. Things start to get really discordant when Timber Timbre begin smashing musical ideas together with seemingly wild abandon. Melancholic synths abruptly give way to screeching guitar solos, muted and eerie lounge beats morph suddenly into jangly indie. On the one hand this means that ‘Sincerely, Future Pollution’ is in some ways a perfect representation of our conflicted, uncertain times, but it also makes the record a challenging, uncompromising listen.