Album Review: Love The Future by Chester French

Though this is the Pharrell Williams- mentored duo’s debut album, frontman D.A. Wallach already knows the perils of rock-star romance: ”This ain’t groupie love, ’cause you mean so much to me,” he pleads in ”Bebe Buell,” a number named after Liv Tyler’s mom. Okay, he’s being sarcastic. But given the infectiously goofy tunes on Love the Future — the Beastie Boys covering the Beach Boys? — it might not be long till Wallach’s girl trouble is real.

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Chester French could make a great neo-power pop album, an intriguing psychedelic chamber-noise-pop album, or a fun hip-pop album. The problem with Love the Future is that the duo tried to make all of those albums at once. D.A. Wallach and Max Drummey were still Harvard students when they began working on these songs, and the pair lets listeners know how smart and ambitious they are throughout, from the spaghetti Western-esque "Introduction" to the copious strings and interludes that follow.

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A friend of mine used to hole up in the Quad studios at Harvard for weeks at a time. The place sounded both like a safe haven and a stimulating technical challenge: how to master these boards of knobs and switches, to control sound’s unruly splatter? While my buddy’s goal was to get into the dorm rooms of the college girls through their speakers (giving his acoustic ballads that requisite yearning), he early on told me of a couple of underclassmen who had larger ambitions. D.A.

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It’s become gauchely common for reviews of Chester French’s Love the Future to compare the duo of Max Drummey and D. A. Wallach to fellow Ivy Leaguers Vampire Weekend. While both groups’ unassuming Calvin Klein model looks are sure to set indie-girl hearts aflutter, and the fact that Chester French also happened to form at a school that is pretty hard to get into (Harvard), there’s not much to link the two groups.

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