Juno's
"A Future Lived in Past Tense"

The following commentary was written and provided by Jenny Eliscu. Winter, 2001.

    If Juno singer/guitar player Arlie Carstens had his way, you would listen to his band’s latest record, the achingly beautiful A Future Lived in Past Tense, sprawled on your bed, the music piped in on a high-tech pair of headphones. The vicissitudes of every day life might have you confined to a desk with a crappy boombox, but the request itself reflects Carstens and his band mates’ interest in crafting music so sonically complex that it demands a solitary, zen-like listening experience.

    Why? Because what will happen if you shut your eyes and listen to the album intently is the kind of total sensory immersion that you’ve had over the years listening to other albums of cinematic grandeur -- Talk Talk's The Spirit of Eden, Husker Du’s Zen Arcade, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Musically, A Future Lived in Past Tense is more full of furious, twitching energy than those comparisons would imply, but the emotional reactions the album conjures are similar. Colors will flash on the backs of your eyelids and a quick chill will run up your spine. You might suddenly feel short of breath, enervated by the potency of songs like “Help Is on the Way” and “Covered with Hair” The fists you had clenched into white-knuckle balls will loosen, a smile spreading across your face as the lazy melody of “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow” wafts alongside echoey guitar lines. The outside world will disappear and it will be just you and these eleven songs, your blood pulsing to the rhythm of Juno’s music.

    As three guitars weave their tunes into an intricate pastiche of lovely vibrating tones, and as an assortment of found sounds – crows cawing, a weather report, the voice on an answering maching – catch your ear, you’ll find your brain recording bits of lyrics, the words grabbing hold and begging analysis. And while it may often sound like these are “you done me wrong” songs, Carstens cautions that “this isn’t an album about lovers in the most obvious sense. This album,” he explains, “is about being plenty old enough to know that life's past, present and future are the fluid total of its history, losses, regrets, joys, politics and fears. This record isn't really about me, or any one person, or what they did to me, or to you, or to the guy down the street. It's not entirely about being young and regretful, and it’s not exactly about being old and hopeful. It's a bunch of stories about people, and how the events of their past define who they are in the present and what they may become (or fear becoming) in the future.”

    A Future Lived in Past Tense is the Seattle band’s second full-length album, recorded with the help of hometown friends Nick Harmer (of Death Cab for Cutie) and Nate Mendel (of Foo Fighters) playing bass. The record ups the ante thrown down by their 1999 debut, This Is the Way it Goes and Goes and Goes, building on their long-held interest in combining the vehement intensity of punk bands like Fugazi and Husker Du – evoked most strongly here by Carstens’ raspy Bob Mould-like voice – with elaborate soundscapes and a deeply affecting moodiness that makes their songs at once radiant and miserable. The emotional release the album offers is only magnified by the band’s live show, where they discharge all of the songs’ passion and bile in an overwhelming fusillade.

    You will, inevitably, feel compelled to peg A Future Lived in Past Tense with the name of some genre that you think best approximates what this band, with its irreverence for those kinds of musical constraints, is trying to do. Whatever you decide to call it will prove language’s failure to describe that rush you felt listening to it on your bed.