The Future Is Our Way Out

Chronique

In 2023, Chicago-based band Brigitte Calls Me Baby made waves with a retro-minded debut EP, This House Is Made of Corners, that combined Presley-vintage balladry and lush, soaring '80s new wave, with a bit of spiky, Strokes-ian flair and Morrissey-esque drama thrown in for good measure. Less than a year later, their debut album, The Future Is Our Way Out, seamlessly re-sequences the five tracks from the EP with six new songs. The original EP was recorded with Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb (John Prine, Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile), whom Brigitte leader Wes Leavins met (and passed along a band demo to) on the set of Baz Luhrmann's Elvis biopic. Having portrayed Elvis Presley in a touring production of the musical Million Dollar Quartet that Luhrmann saw, Leavins was enlisted to help with the soundtrack. While the charismatic Leavins mostly manages to transcend clear touchpoints like Presley -- and the '50s-inspired Morrissey -- on his band's debut, Presley pastiche surfaces most conspicuously on the quieter moments of yearning rock & roll ballad "Always Be Fine," where the singer really nails that distinctive vibrato. Likewise, on the Morrissey end of the spectrum, the band offer one song in particular, "I Wanna Die in the Suburbs," that not only sounds like a lost Smiths gem but includes a chorus that emotes, "I wanna die in your four-car garage/Turn out the lights and send in the entourage…But I don't wanna die alone." While these songs are a tremendous amount of fun for fans of their reference points -- because they're legitimately good songs, and to say that the band pull them off is an understatement -- the bulk of the album is populated by catchy, romantic, almost timeless material that lands somewhere in between while also borrowing from later eras of indie. In other words, they fall upon a sound of their own. One highlight, "Impressively Average," for instance, is a driving, rockabilly-injected dance-rock entry with an infectious bassline, layers of shimmery and purer guitar tones, and handclap-like "two-and, four" snare beats. On that song, Leavins eventually reaches for the stratosphere with an elated "Oh my God, I am home." It can be hard to pick high points, though, as every song here is a potential hit single, with the possible exception of the (Elvis- and) Santo & Johnny-evoking outro, "Always Be Fine," a hushed love song bubbling over with desire ("Some days I want to scream out your name/But mostly I refrain"). Band lore of note: The name Brigitte Calls Me Baby was taken from an exchange of letters between Leavins (then in high school and having done a class project on the actress) and Brigitte Bardot.

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