Furniteur is Washington D.C.’s indie club-vibe solo act Brittany Sims and the DC label Prince George records has deemed this music worthy of a (shrink-wrapped!) cassette release for cruising in your Sebring convertible, in a warm summery suburban kind of area. That is the #1 application I would prescribe this tape for. Do not listen to it in the New England winter, your sad old Dodge Spirit, while driving home from the sauerkraut factory where you work.
So, all of this is recorded on analog synthesizers, and released to cassette, which I suppose makes it “cool.” “Furniteur is human aesthetic,” writes the label review of the cassette. OK, fine.
The opening track, “Modern Love” is a laid back synthy jam, with vaguely sexual bored-sounding monotone lyrics. Fun enough to tap a toe to, sounds really rich, makes me nostalgic for Ladytron’s first record, or that nifty flash-in-the-pan Casio band The Capricorns. The second track, “Secret Plans”, is where I perk up a little. Here we have darker, new-wavier, muffled and vaguely threatening bored-sounding lyrics. Makes me feel like i am at a huge cavernous dark dance club like in the movies, doing scary injectable drugs, flailing my arms in a strobe light, and afterwards I will take a bath in Cosmopolitans and have a long chill on a king sized taupe colored luxury bedspread.
This third song (“Out of Love”) mostly makes me feel like I am trapped in a lucid nightmare where I smell like a Sephora and I am inexplicably trying on suede zip up boots in lower Manhattan. ( I then read that “Furniteur began as a concept while Brittany was studying fine arts at the New York Studio School in Greenwich Village.”) A small victory here with the Julee Cruise/Badilamenti vibes on the washed out, unintelligible “la la la” lyrics, but… I had to flip the tape over for this? The final track, “Kaleidoscopic” returns to the new-wavy-gravy, with a few rippy guitarlike sounds thrown in for good measure, but now I have that hungover, shoe-trying-on feeling, and the lyrics are indulgent and heartfelt in a way that is making me even more uncomfortable. But, all told, we have a more-than-small success in achieving a Lana Del Rey vibe here, which I am into, as such, not mad that I listened to this tape.
RIYL: Crystal Pepsi, taupe leather, Lana Del Rey, modernity, unisex fragrance, oil painters-turned-synth musicians.
- - Liv Carrow