Transfer
With an uncanny ability to make intimate song styles feel big in scope, San Diego favorites Transfer have made a career of heightening the senses, embellishing timeless rock aesthetics with rousing harmonies and sweeping, reverb-drenched guitars. However, as its title suggests, the latest full-length actually seeks to endow their music with a more tangible sense of time this go round: that of right now, or, more specifically, a moment from now. Future Selves turns a corner from the scorching, wild-haired exuberance of their Sunken Eyes EP, embracing a more contemporary palette of textures and rhythms to craft music that better reflects our insatiable craving for the shiny and new. Yet it is without irony that, amid the deftly placed samples and highly polished production, these songs are fleshed out by the most organic of instrumentation, including almost hymnal choral passages, doleful brass, piano, organ and strings (courtesy of the San Diego Symphony). The outcome is a diverse assortment of tracks that occupy a modern world at odds with its own conflicting senses of urgency and detachment; a sometimes cold place that grows increasingly wistful for a warmer, more natural setting.
Indeed, the most profound moments of Future Selves actually feel rooted in tradition, echoing the century-old soundtrack of untouched Western landscapes. Constructed around the raspy, soulful songwriting that has been linchpin to all Transfer’s work, these songs are not so much a pastiche, but a recognition that stepping into the future, even a cold, anxious and desolate one, does not require leaving the warmest elements of our past behind.
