Review Summary: ...Unless your conviction is you're not entirely sure
What happens to a man when he fails ？ How do we change in our lives ？ Are we the same persons we were in the past ？ Is there a purpose in what we do ？ If not, why do we do it anyway ？ The Machine that made Us is an album about those questions. It was 2004 when Flotation Toy Warning released their debut album: The Bluffer’s Guide to the Flight Deck. This little jewel, even though it was very well received by the critics, never had a large public success, and so it slowly became a lonesome “book of songs that no one ever sings”. The band never broke up but, apart from some sporadic appearances, it remained silent. It’s with a little surprise that in June 2017 we received their second album, thirteen years after their debut. Here we found the same typical sound that they had in The Bluffers Guide to the Flight Deck, a sound made of dreamy atmospheres, marvelous musical landscapes, perfect fusion of acoustic sounds and electronics and the construction of the songs with layers of sound that interact in a very complex and profound way. But in this thirteen-year-long pause the different influences that were present in the debut album found a way to coexist in a more homogeneous and personal sound. If during a listen of the Bluffer’s Guide one could hear some Pink Floyd, King Crimson, some Neutral Milk Hotel or Radiohead, the Machine That made Us purely sounds like Flotation Toy Warning from beginning to end. The band did not reject those influences but rather assimilated and represented them in they own personal way.
The aspect of this album that really demonstrates the maturation of the band over the years is the themes of Paul Carter’s lyrics. When he wrote those songs (apparently he did that in a year-long retreat in a Welsh church) he didn’t abandon his previous style made of psychedelic narratives and dreamlike images, but if in his previous work he sometimes used those atmospheres only for the sake of a specific stylistic effect, here we really have the impression that those images were used to express some very personal emotions. It’s no longer some absurd beautiful text with some vague meaning but the power of those oneiric representation is used to express the absurdity of everyday life. In the Machine that made Us Carter tells us about “the art of failure” and how he had to come to terms with the discrepancy between the great image he had of himself as an artist and the little attention he received (In my mind I was a star / Heaped in praise for my art /But I wasn't, not at all). He tells the struggle of finding himself, the change he had in his personality and the difficulty in deciding if, now that he became something else, he is a better or a worse person (There were better versions of me / I miss them now they’re gone /They had to break /It was my mistake to think they’d always carry on). Above this plan of very human and very concrete problematics, the album often has some spiritual overturns. We found some questioning about the religious meaning of things and, in a way, we could see this album as a sort of brand new testament in which Carter tries to sort his beliefs. There is plenty of religious imagery here and there as the reference of his “book of songs”, some biblically sounding lines (and all the world was my design) and even a little irony (I know it’s raining / But did you have to build an ark ？ / You go easy now, that’s how religions start). However, we find the center of this spiritual dimension in the middle of the album, in the song I quite like it when he sings. Here the narrator is “calling for volunteers to climb the mountain” and in the list of required skills there is one of my favorite quotes of this album: “Must be armed with fear and firm convictions / Unless your conviction is you're not entirely sure”. In this sentence, we really understand the struggle of the narrator in searching for a meaning in his existence and, at the same time, not being able to reach the level of self-confidence needed to fully embrace a personal philosophical view.
In this optic of spiritual quest, the music perfectly blends in. This is an album which takes its time in presenting its sounds and which needs time to be assimilated. It is not an album you can rush in and get at first listen, you have to let it slip in your subconscious and let it germinate, it needs to be listened over and over to really internalize all the sounds and all the layers. there are some great examples of how the return of same music fragments in the same song and the interlocking of different musical bricks represents the mind of the narrator trying to understand some aspect of life by a circular return of the same thought and the strive to harmonize the contrasting aspect of his inner self. The perfect example of this aspect is the final track of the album: The moongoose analogue. This song, almost thirteen minutes long, contains perhaps two minutes of musical material repeated, contrasted, repeated again, with one little final piece of philosophical certainty (There will be no ‘forever' / There will be no 'til the end of time’ / Not much, but, that much / Is clear to me). Is this album perfect ？ Perhaps not. Are humans perfect ？ Certainly not. With The machine that made Us, Flotation Toy Warning managed to reproduce, in a one-hour long musical journey, the life, the growth and the doubts of human life. And if this album can’t deliver us the ultimate meaning of life it sure can teach us something about ourselves.
