Outstanding review of I Will Save You From the 21st Century.

 Read it HERE: https://www.turnandwork.com/music/i-will-save-you-from-the-21st-century/

William Carlos Whitten has an impressive CV. He was the frontman of the underappreciated NYC rock bands St. Johnny and Grand Mal. His first collaboration with Diana Crash, 2025’s TELEPATHS, was a lo-fi, experimental indie rock record, with infectious and compelling eccentricity. The story behind the record is just as unexpected: the pair met in a laundromat, bonded over literature, and wound up releasing a record that was instant add to my best-of-the-year list. Oh, and he writes killer short stories too.

In his genre-defining novel Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced Case, a kind of man-out-of-time protagonist, a noir-ish figure based on detectives in early Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett novels. It’s a tone that pervades Whitten’s short stories, and Whitten himself assumes that persona on his new collaboration with Crash, I Will Save You From the 21st Century. 

If the title didn’t give it away,  I Will Save You is a record unmistakably rooted in modern anxiety, full of weird and challenging ideas. It’s sometimes a conversation between Whitten and Crash, sometimes an abstract exploration of big ideas, and sometimes simply another great collaboration.

The roles are established early: the title track leads the record, and over a driving synth track, Whitten compares Crash’s beauty to “a cassette tape…a paperback book…an internal combustion engine”, while she “just wants to be left alone / with her electric friends”.

On “Nobody Belongs to You”, he tries again to save her, but “Instead of taking my hand / you slap my face”. “Doomscrolling in a Whole Foods Parking Lot” is a text conversation between Whitten’s increasingly anxious life events and Crash’s half-interested “OMG I’m so sorry” while she’s on a Zoom with work.

In a lot of ways, I Will Save You reads a lot more like seeds of short stories than anything else. That’s especially true of the two non-musical tracks; the pseudo-obituary “About William Carlos Whitten” comes off like a comment on misinformation and AI hallucinations, and “Phonecall” is a conversation between Whitten and his reluctant and impatient brother about an idea for a science fiction film, but the loaded conversation is full of hints at an ugly history between the two.

There’s a dreaminess to the record – everything feels like it’s moving a little slower than full-speed, a little hazy, a little wobbly. Even the closer, the drum-machine-and-synth cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” has a strangely compelling wooziness, like a cassette tape that’s been left in the sun too long. 

I Will Save You is not quite a concept album, but it’s as compelling as a bunch of loosely-connected ideas. It took me several listens to engage in — you have to trust that Whitten’s doing something interesting, with references to Proust, Pythagoras and (I think) Godard at various points. In the same way that William Gibson’s novels reinvented the hard-boiled detective through the lens of hyper-consumerism, Whitten brings a kind of retro-futurism to the record, the interplay with Crash making Whitten out to be an analog ghost haunting a digital world.