Future Islands - Singles

Future Islands
Singles
24 March 2014
4AD

3 stars out of 5

 

Singles is the fourth studio LP by Baltimore’s (by way of Greenville, North Carolina) synthpop ensemble Future Islands. For a quick musical description, imagine Van Morrison fronting Simple Minds (or perhaps Feargal Sharkey fronting Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark). Singer Samuel Herring’s mouth, throat, and lungs work together to produce some crazy-ass soulful sounds, providing an unexpected counterpoint to Gerrit Welmers’s New Wave-y synth melodies, which in turn sometimes sit rather awkwardly on the same cramped loveseat as William Cashion’s post-grunge-y guitars, but are usually accompanied by the latter’s rather more appropriate picked bass.

When it works, as it does with the second track, “Spirit,” it works very well. At other times, such as during all of “A Song for Our Grandfathers,” nothing works. I could toss around accusations of cheese and sap, but it’s not worth my time. And, for some unknown reason, Herring decides to invoke the extreme metal gods and unleash a few death growls on “Fall from Grace,” an otherwise very un-metal slow synthpop track. Luckily, the album closes with the much stronger “A Dream of You and Me,” a New Wave-y ditty that would have gotten regular rotation on the airways 30 years ago. The last line of lyric on the record is “staring at the sea,” although, in case you were curious, nothing on this LP resembles The Cure in the slightest.

Future Islands is one of the weirder American synthpop-revival bands out there today, mostly because of Herring’s singing. Musically, they toe the straight and narrow, but Herring continuously colours outside the lines with his adventurous vocal pencil crayons. Perhaps if their music became as adventurous as the vocals this would be a very good band, but for the time being they’re just a very good idea for a band.

reviewed by Richard Krueger