These Are Powers are an experimentalist group with members from Brooklyn and Chicago that strive to deconstruct genre conventions through their polyrhythmic and noise composition. Their third installment, All Aboard Future, strays out beyond the outermost ring of Saturn in sounding at times like Bjork’s harrowing Volta while retaining their distinct American metropolitan swagger, see the opener “Easy Answers.” The music itself could be considered trip-hop, having the symptoms of a Massive Attack or Portishead album, however, there’s something about their sound that puts them in a category of their own altogether much like Sun-Ra’s 1973 Pathways to Unknown Worlds falling just short in the innovation game against the space-age prophet shaman-philosopher.
Songs like “Parallel Shores” or “Life of Birds” complicates this classification further, where the track seems glitch-hop inspired with a splash of Beth Hirsch-esque vocals. What would you describe an album that has a theoretical starting point that attempts to define itself as anti-genre yet keeps a fairly familiar sound? Bad experimentation? I’m afraid so. However, if you put the time in, These Are Powers are a quite an interesting listen. I’m inclined to say that they’ve reached a midpoint in experimentation where they can claim to be boundary-pushers and trendsetters, yet have done little in untried methodology, an undeserved sense of achievement. They reclaim some legitimacy however through their collaboration with visual artists whom made artworks for them to be included in the album booklet. It adds a tiny bit to this experience in idiosyncrasy.
In this age of music creation, there might simply just be no sounds left to mess around with, we might have entered the age of noise scarcity. But, in a way the sound achieves a soothing therapeutic direction, simply because you don’t hear these types of albums often and it’s a good change of pace. However, it’s definitely no Pierre Schaeffer or John Cage, the boundary is definitely pushed, but only a little.
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