Futureshock – Phantom Theory

Competent and well produced release, to file alongside Fluke, Chemical Brothers, Underworld. I think "Late at Night" is inspired by Tubeway Army/Gary Numan's "Are Friends Electric?"

Futureshock entered the mainstream just as the dance crossover bubble burst; Emerson had left Underworld, the Chemical Brothers had muted sales, Deconstruction had gone bust, Sasha & Digweed had absconded to the USA and Pete Tong was in credibility collapse.
After some decent remixes and a blinding first single “Sparc” the album arrived and apart from the singles it’s not good. Too much of it is dull, uninspired and sounding like a band rushing out a product with half-baked “that’ll do” despite being four years in the making.

This is one I bought on release in 2003. It’s got some good stuff on it. I have a few 12” from it too. I like the harder dance cuts on it. The artwork is cool too. This and FC/Kahuna Machine Says Yes are two albums I’ve kept after a big cull of mundane electronica and dance I bought in DJ years!

Phantom Theory does not re-invent the wheel, it just show-cases what Futureshock are all about. Their tech-house sound has long been championed from DJ's ranging from the techno stable, to the house stable and I believe this shows how versatile their production is.

I would say that Phantom Theory is an honest album, Futureshock don't pretend to be something their not, which had become the trennd. When Sasha released Airdrawndagger (a breaks album), it was hardly what Sasha was all about and it received muted reviews as a result.

The only criticism I would levy at this album is that it did sound a touch dated and could have been done with being released 18 months earlier.

I really cannot understand how a person can give a 1/5 mark to this album. Of course we can find thousands of albums better than Futureshock's "Phantom Theory". But it's a very powerfull dancefloor oriented album.

I can understand that some people may hate technohouse and dancefloor electronic music, but the fact that you don't like a style doesn't mean that something done in that style is bad.

Phantom theory is a very nice job and a very honest project. Before published this album Futureshock did a very long remixing trainning. They were very brave when they published this album. They could easily published an album in the way of the eighties EBM revival which was the mainstream in 2003. It's obvious that they know very well the dancefloor escene. But they preferer to went for an early nineties techno sound (in the way of Empirion, Age of Love, and Underworld). This is an example coherene.

"Phantom Theory" came ten years late, or ten years early. Beacuse revivals are aproximately every 20 years. But it left us a fistfull of grate songs such as: Statikman, Another Hit, Late At Night, Satellite, Kato's Revenge, On My Mind, Wide Open, Spark or Birdcage.

Maybe it's not the best album in the history of music, but 9 really good songs in an album with 12 tracks, should inspired a little bit of respect. If I were a musician, I would hanve changed one om my hands for that 75% quality ratio (and that doesn't mean at all that Fifty One, Pride's Paranoia and Frequency are bad tunes).