SONG: "The Future Freaks Me Out" - Motion City Soundtrack (I Am the Movie, 2003)

While navigating my way through the litany of generic crap which makes up the bonus DVD on Epitaph’s Punk-O-Rama 10 the other day, I rediscovered a track which dented my consciousness a few years ago and was overjoyed to find it eliciting the same response from me now as it did back then.

The song’s called The Future Freaks Me Out, and is the signature tune of big-haired Minnesota nerd-squad Motion City Soundtrack. In the video, their lead singer Justin Pierre sports emo specs, an innocently bemused look and a barnet that would put Yahoo Serious to shame while the rest of the band gamely clown around in a variety of multicoloured settings. However, there’s melancholy afoot!

Some girl called Betty’s giving him a hard time. From the sounds of things, they’re a pair of Gen-X misfits who are uneasily wasting their days together, or at least really ought to be. Listening to Pierre’s gawky existential ponderings (which take in everything from Will & Grace and Footloose to failing to understand the appeal of drum’n’bass), you’re given the image of two people sat drinking coffee in their pyjamas in separate bedrooms way across town, both thinking of each other and not really knowing what to do about it. However, rather than lie around moping like half his label-mates seem to be doing, his solution, it seems, is to dance. In fact, it’s not just to dance - it’s to get his favourite pair of love-pants on and crack out the Napoleon Dynamite moves.

The song begins exactly as it means to go on, with the irrepressibly catchy hookline: “I’m on fire, and now I think I’m ready / To bust a move, check it out, I’m rockin’ steady, go!” A wuzzy synth see-saws over the top of it all for that extra new-wave edge, but it’s that nagging little three-note phrase that opens the track which really makes it; it gets in your head and refuses to budge. “I’m on fire”… just when you think it’s disappeared, it’ll casually pop up somewhere else as a musical motif or incidental guitar solo, guaranteeing that even if you remember nothing else about the song, those three notes will still be with you for days afterwards. Indeed, while the overall tune itself is straightforward enough, it’s perhaps deceptively so: with its oddball chord progressions and hopscotch-style melodic back-and-forth, it’s angular in the same way that a band like Bracket are, always shifting in a quirky direction, jumping a couple of extra steps down the scale instead of just going for the obvious note.

It’s a great little song, the kind of cutesy geek-rock ditty purposely designed to put a smile on your face. For all its apparent uncertainty, The Future Freaks Me Out is as sure to lodge itself in your brain as anything by Sum 41 or New Found Glory - like the best bits of The Rentals crossed with The Get Up Kids and Devo, it’s a bounce-along emo-pop gem, and a minor anthem for that special kind of dork who thinks he can win a girl’s heart with a mix-tape, a daft pair shoes and a goofy pin-badge. I sure hope Betty got with him in the end, because if not then she’s a damn fool.