Her Space HolidayThe Past Presents the Future
Marc Bianchi, the man behind Her Space Holiday, is a master of finding new ways to make clinical depression sound gorgeous. On The Past Presents the Future, Bianchi perfects his formula of spinning morose tales sprinkled with a few torturous moments of hope, while backing them up with a swirling combination of majestic strings that violently clash with the throbbing electronic beats that propel the songs. Perhaps spurred on by the work of the various artists and producers who successfully remodeled his previous album on The Young Machines Remixed, Bianchi experiments even more on the latest Her Space Holiday release, providing a somewhat more ambitious album that his previous albums.
It helps that Bianchi mocks his navel-gazing reputation in the darkly comic “Missed Medicine”, where he lists his keys to success: “tell everyone you’re clinically depressed”, use all of your friends for songwriting material, “and if you’re lucky enough to have a parent pass away” make sure to exploit the resulting grief by making a big show of it. Despite the self-deflating nature of “Missed Medicine”, it might be the darkest song in the album as it suggests that Bianchi’s channeling of his negative emotions into his music is less of a catharsis and more of a cheap form of self-exploitation. “1, 2, 3, it’s easy as 1, 2, 3” he muses, in his breathy, overmedicated drone, in a surreal Jackson Five moment. (He also, brilliantly, steals the chorus to another classic pop song on “The Great Parade”, where he twists George Harrison’s most well known chorus into “Here comes your son / He isn’t alright”.
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