Sincerely, Future Pollution continues to raise Timber Timbre crooked bar

Is it a love letter to the good that remains, or hate mail from the bad days yet to come? Sincerely, Future Pollution buds with the gluey romance of “Velvet Gloves and Spit” (“I was a stranger too familiar and not enough / But I once saw / The touch of your velvet hand upon my face / I recall / Velvet gloves and spit and your embrace”), but the song’s mournful glow suggests an affair that was doomed from the start. This time around singer/multi-instrumentalist Taylor Kirk ceded more creative room to guitarist Simon Trottier and keyboardist Mathieu Charbonneau, and the dynamic shift can be heard early on in tracks like “Grifting” and the instrumental “Skin Tone”, which strut and spread out with hypnagogic synthesizer runs.

Sincerely, Future Pollution wades through a humid swamp of sensory memory. “Moving through this tomb / Of vapor and perfume / And fog-filled rooms... / The voice is barking of nausea and fear / An unholy jargon in the judgment seat”, remembers Kirk on the stalking centerpiece “Sewer Blues”. The record’s recurring images include both sewers and floating cathedrals, with the high and low colliding in the burned-out bossa nova “Western Questions”, as one disappears into another.

Even at Timber Timbre’s unruffled pace the album does lag in spots, mostly by way of the instrumental tracks and where they landed in the sequencing. Still, it all comes into view when the David Lynch-ian lullaby of “Floating Cathedral” drifts in. Sincerely, Future Pollution continues to raise the band’s crooked bar.