FUTURE ELEVATORS

Vinyl LP pressing. 2016 release. Michael Shackelford first wrote down the words “future” and “elevators” a few years ago on a rough instrumental demo. The music never grew into a finished song, but that simple, surprisingly evocative phrase stuck. It's an apt phrase for one of Birmingham's most original musical acts. Shackelford-the group's founder, mainstay, and guiding creative force-is something of a pop confectioner who thinks up impossible sounds and makes them a reality. His self-titled debut as Future Elevators expertly mixes whimsy and gravity, the fantastical with the everyday. Even as he grounds his lyrics in real-world issues, he fills his songs with new and improbable combinations of familiar sounds: the jagged pastoral folk of ‘Alabama Song’, the Rube Goldberg blues riffs of ‘Machine Maker’, the retro-futuristic R&B of ‘Modern World’, the warm drone of the ten-minute instrumental closer ‘Aphrodite’. Shackelford spent a year piecing his debut album together. Recording with him was Lynn Bridges (Devendra Banhart/Dexateens) and the album was mixed by Darrell Thorp (Radiohead/Beck).