Gary Flanagan

New Brunswick’s Gary Flanagan has completely embraced the bedroom mentality that technology has brought to music. He works in his bedroom studio, burning CDs of his own tunes, but rather than looking forward musically, he has been staring backward longingly at that most divisive of decades, the 1980s. Future Fashion is Flanagan’s fourth album, although it is the first to be released commercially, and it doesn’t really offer any surprises to anyone who has heard any of his previous musical adventures. The ten songs offer the expected beats, blips and bleeps, with monotonous vocals and the overall effect is like going back in time by about 20 years. There’s definitely an authenticity to Flanagan’s music, in that it sounds like it could have come out sometime in the mid-’80s, but that in part has to do with the simplicity of the songs. While there are other bands riding the ’80s synthesiser revival (such as the Faint and Ladytron), they do so in a way that doesn’t sound dated in the same way that Future Fashion does. An acquired taste.