Life in the bourgeois cybertopia of Startup City is making me a little anxious. People will have you believe my hometown is under siege, is fighting change. That this is an occupy moment. People getting evicted and laying down in front of buses. I can kind of relate. I feel like I’ve been duct taped back together so many times I don’t know what I’m a part of anymore. Almost as if I’m from a scene that never really existed.

I don’t want to come off as against everything; you need to be for something too. I try to avoid pining for those halcyon days that never really exist outside of memory. Rather, this record is all about a musical path forward, about looking around and imagining where we’ll be in 20 years if we just follow that path.

So yeah, a new record. It’s got it’s own groove and even some prog rock chops here and there. In fact, James DePrato turned me on to some really great (if marginal) classic rock. Like Argent. (Argent?) And he plied me with some extraordinary Australian Glam mix tapes, the upshot of all of which are guitars that are in your face. Up your nose. They snake and harmonize. They jangle too, thanks in no small part to special guest Peter Buck on most songs.

There are a lot of little stories on this record. But they seem to add up to one big story. What that overarching story is, I am not really sure, but I’ll know it when it punches me in the face. It’s loosely conceptual but universal all the same, I’d contend. And of course, you’ll find it laced with humor and a persistent anxiety throughout. And while I had originally considered all this leaning toward the dystopian, now I wonder. The future might just save us. But we have to get there first.

The record delivers moments of grandiosity absent last time around; Temple was a stripped down affair. Now we’ve got strings and horns and those prog guitars that border on straight up arena rock. Hang in there because, as John Murry declared after a first listen, “It brings a tear to the eye and blood to the johnson.”

So put it on, drop the needle, and take the ride. The future is in the groove. (grooves)