Future Proof by Blue Tomorrows

It has been difficult to maintain a calendar lately with everything set adrift. The previous hustle has gone quiet, with what was once communal experience turned inward to the individual. Future Proof, the latest offering from Blue Tomorrows, understands how to take this moment and stretch it out into time and space. Instead of hurrying along, it finds the value in slowing down to reflect and ponder. Like finding an old box of photos and trying to align the images with memory, Blue Tomorrows reaches into not one room but many, attempting to piece together a remembered life.

The project found its start in 2018, when guitarist/vocalist Sarah Nienaber (Candace, Web of Sunsets) sought a more solo outlet apart from her regular projects. For the recording of Future Proof, Sarah Rose (Candace) joined in on bass and vocals, with Michaela Gradstein (Plastic Cactus) rounding out the troupe on guitar. With a change in outlook and lineup, gone is the twang that pervaded their debut, Without Color (Moon Glyph, 2019), replaced here by understated vocals alongside darker tones and a breezy drum machine. The instrumentation has expanded in subtle ways, with a vocoder and various field recordings both finding their way into the mix. Album highlight “All the Dark” puts forward its best bedroom waltz, with layered vocals that create a yearning, melodic round that loops itself into an unexpected Pacific Northwest lullaby. On “Vanished World,” the last song recorded during these sessions, the trio manage to make regret sound like triumph.

Recorded in Portland, Trail, and Vernonia, Oregon, Future Proof offers an unanchored vision tied to solitary space that occasionally looks out into the larger world, hopeful but resigned. It is an album of considering and leaving, of wandering but not aimlessly. The songs within are reflective like a river, not a lake – ambling, drifting, and floating along a strong current, intent on the daydream. “You didn’t know you missed the way it was,” sings Nienaber on “Uncanny Valley,” a declaration which becomes its own crescendo.

Suddenly, the calendar is out the window, the river is rising, the dream is a space we inhabit.

breezy homespun psychedelic pop tunes crafted by Sarah Nienaber

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