The future is the question, too, with, say, Section 25, whose album Love & Hate (in the English Countryside) has thrilled me for a couple of weeks now. Section 25, when they were around, were a boutique taste: on the West Coast, where I lived during those years, you didn’t meet a whole lot of people who would have had any reason to know who Section 25 were. You’d see their records with the gorgeous Peter Saville sleeves in the store, and you’d hear them once in a while (a zealous indie store clerk in Portland would play new S25 records for anybody who looked even mildly interested): in their use of synths and steady, even rhythms, they seemed to embrace the idea of progress and not to reject but to ignore the sort of warm-fuzzy expression of manufactured “old” values then sweeping the U.S. Section 25 songs were treatises about their own existence; their lyrics did not speak to you or to anyone. They spoke to and of themselves.