Only once with every blue moon comes an artist that seems so familiar yet out of space as Calvin Love. On Super Future, his first album for Arts & Crafts, the young charmer from Edmonton, Alberta, steeps songs of psychedelic wisdom in celestial sensuality. Calvin Love arrives an enigma, a strutting, crooning contradiction: as menacing as he is magnetic, like sex and murder wrapped together in a trench coat. With coolness that defies contrivance, Love links sounds and images of science-fiction vintage with an auspicious version of the future. "Automaton" plays late summer knight-rider funk like a factory machine, while soul-drenched bass and electric guitars chase each other in flirtatious dialogue. Calvin Love's reedy tenor phases in the same atmospheric register as age-old synthesizers, singing: "Now off in the distance, her machine calls out 'I wish you were my robot' so I wouldn't feel left out'. The music drips with crystal aura, blending obsession with the beauty of artifice and the inner systems of real and natural things. It's this infallible match of the authentic to the inventive that make Calvin Love's Super Future so strange and inviting.
