FUTURE NATIVE play overly earnest, hand wringing acoustic rock music and sound like a watered down Bon Jovi. Hard as it might be to believe, but for someone somewhere music doesn’t get any better than this.
FUTURE NATIVE are a husband and wife team (oh oh) from Australia and judging by the photographs that accompany the booklet for their CD ‘Politics of Love’ (pur – lease) have spawned about 20 children and may well live up a gum-tree. Most of the songs are by the man of the (tree) house, one P.J Creamer (not to be confused with P.J Kramer or indeed P.J Proby, he of the infamous split trousers). Beyond Jon Bon Bouffant Jovi, John Lennon also makes an appearance on ‘Infatuate’ and there is also some of the Finn Brothers and Buckingham/Nicks/McVie era Fleetwood Mac in there; apologies to fans of Lennon, the Finns and the Mac.
Their fate is sealed with the opening track ‘Answers’ on which P.J bemoans money and how we need to “save this earth for the future of our youth” and that having looked at the sun and into his soul he’s come across the answer, which astoundingly turns out to be ‘love’. On ‘Time Will be Good’ we get some tiresome Celtic overtones and use of the word “emancipate”. P.J also uses an indiscriminate number of “woahs” and “yeahs” on his music. The last track ‘Jesus and Mary’ is outstanding in its awfulness, the chorus of “Jehova & Allah Buddah..etc.” so horrendously out of tune you may want to cry uncontrollably.
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The overt hippy nonsense reaches its zenith on ‘Natural Woman’ which obviously is an ode to P.J’s wife, Mel, despite being a co-write – if she’s responsible for the lyrics then we’re in real trouble. Although they’ve tried to give the song a rock haze (including a pointless percussive wig-out at the end) it still stinks to high heaven of self-congratulatory smugness: “She only eats the veggies, calls the animals her friends / She chains herself to trees and says she’ll love me to the end”: a powerful message that has me in mind of hunting down and eating a deer and then setting fire to its woodland habitat so I can build a MacDonald’s.
Any qualities in tune-smithery are damned by the sanctimonious sermonising that dominates, only given brief respite so that the Creamers have sufficient time to tell us how wonderful they are and how fabulous their life is. They even leave a little space at the end of the album so that one of their umpteen children can sing “I’ll never let you go starlight / Oh I love you so starlight”.
In a word: no.
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