The Future Process- Change

The Future Process's debut album starts out with the discouraging "Victim," which features such inane couplets as "Sometimes I wonder why / We live and then we die." It's not a good start, but if you can get past that, the rest of the album is significantly better. Mixed by Cesium_137's Isaac Glendening and mastered by Ted Phelps of Imperative Reaction, it comes with a good pedigree and features much higher production values than you'd expect from a first effort, and the songwriting and arrangements, featuring mostly synthesizers, drum machines, and the odd bit of overdriven guitar for a touch of industrial flavor, are catchy yet mopy in the radio-friendly manner of such crossover acts as God Lives Underwater. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination--the beats on "Misdirected" are pretty amateurish, and "Timeout" is moping and dated--but there's plenty of promise. "Ridin" is dreamy and stony, with some lovely harmonized vocal layering, and "Money" is more raw and jagged, with an almost punk feel. "What's That?" even manages to recall a hint of the anger behind such coldwave acts as Acumen Nation, though it's still more catchy than brutal, and closing track "Fractures" is a melancholy ballad incorporating retro synth sounds with a more modern, Covenant-inspired approach to programming. This is an album that's accessible but also diverse, and the occasional missteps don't quite hide the natural talent The Future Process has to offer.

Visit The Future Process online at www.thefutureprocess.com for more information and sample tracks.