3 out of 5

Label: Trouble in Mind

Produced by: Sanford Parker

FACS has been a group of space, and distance. Through their minimalism and indirect ways of building tension, they’ve crafted some truly affecting albums, often oblique but also with visceral or unnerving undercurrents that make it feel worth the journey to peel the music apart.

Present Tense, for as in-the-moment as that title sounds, is, perhaps logically, distinct for FACS in a couple of ways: it’s definitely their most immediate set of tracks to date, going for a pretty pummeling, aggressive approach that stretches from 90 Day Men post-rock to the new wave-elements of Disappears and meshes them with FACS’ drone-ish tendencies; and it’s also, in my mind, the group attempting something of a live sound, stripping back some of the studio workshopping of previous discs.

But in accomplishing both of these things, the group loses some of those aforementioned undercurrents, and I’d say it’s not unintentional that Brian Case’s lyrics lose their general crypticness in favor of pretty direct messaging – there’s something very pessimistic fueling much of this disc, which further encases the experience in a sort of monotone, despite that immediacy. Opener XOUT and the title track almost sound like forced callbacks to the yelly, mathiest moments of (It(Is)It); the album’s most fleshed out highlights – Strawberry Cough, Mirrored – both lose themselves at points by trying to paint the FACS sound too broadly, entering an uncanny valley of genre where it’s not necessarily enough of any one style to satisfy.

Stepping back, all of this seems pretty gripping at first. You don’t have to fight to find the groove of these songs, and Case unleashing his vocals on XOUT and General Public is, appropriately, a nice shock versus his usual disaffected slur. And yet I found that the songs weren’t connecting, or when they were – such as the mentioned highlights, which are truly masterful combinations of loose post-rock and electronic tweakings – the connection felt a bit surface level, vibing off a cool sound but not necessarily being hit in the gut by the songs’ overall effects.

The group has a pretty prodigious output in comparison to how long they’ve been around, and even more impressive considering the morphing from band to band its members have gone through. We’re long enough into this game that I can read Present Tense as very purposeful, but it seems like a chapter in the band’s career that will make more sense once its in context of, hopefully, further chapters to come.