This year has been a productive one for the lovelorn. The unrequited passions of Sam Smith have transported the Hertfordshire soul man to giddy heights both here and across the Atlantic. Are We There, Sharon Van Etten’s slow-burn tales of mutually assured destruction, has lit up the blogosphere.
But perhaps the most heartwarming tale of romantic despair in 2014 has been that of Future Islands, a trio based in Baltimore (for the cheap rents). Their fourth album, Singles – the title is playfully polysemic – started the year as a cult synth-rock offering and is ending it as communion, with 2,000-odd people dancing like nobody’s watching from the stalls to the gods, following the example of frontman Samuel T Herring. We hear most of Singles, a record full of synthetic bittersweetness and yearning, delivered by a frontman who goes in for Cossack head-banging, Italianate hand-gestures and belly-flops on to the stage.
It would be crass to call Herring’s antics a shtick, but in the eight months since Future Islands emerged into public consciousness, his shtick has not got old, nor dulled by repetition. Tonight, Herring beats his chest, licks his arm, gyrates like a pole dancer. He shakes the hands of everyone in the front row. During songs such as Tin Man, an older cut, or Fall from Grace, he unleashes gargled screams that recall the Pixies’ Black Francis. The rest of the time, he acts out the emotions in his songs, which alternate between raw and resolved. Between songs he beams.
Future Islands pack one of those narrative arcs that rekindles your faith in the natural justice of pop. They self-financed the recording of Singles. They were then snapped up by London independent powerhouse 4AD (the National, Grimes) and looked set to do a little more business than last time around – On the Water (Thrill Jockey, 2011) – when fate pressed the fast-forward button.
This tipping point happened last March, via an appearance on David Letterman’s talk show. The trio – plus touring drummer – performed their single Seasons (Waiting On You). As the band lined up epic, watery synth chords and propulsive bass reminiscent of both the Killers and Underworld’s Born Slippy, Herring fixed the cameras with Ian Curtis eyes, unburdened himself of inhibitions and sexy-danced his way into notoriety.
His display – one-third motivational speaker, one-third punk rock and one-third supplicating vulnerability – quickly became the stuff of tweets and gifs. His hairline (further back than his 30 years would warrant) and dress sense (schoolteacher shopping in hardware store) received the kind of unforgiving scrutiny usually devoted to actresses’ cellulite.
Naturally, Herring has been carrying on like this in front of audiences for years – the band began in 2006; last May they had clocked up more than 900 gigs, according to Q magazine – but his antics grabbed thousands of unaffiliated onlookers by the lapels and reintroduced the idea of the everyman misfit as a great pop frontman, absent since Jarvis Cocker left the fray.
This London show is Future Islands’ biggest ever, notes Herring – a fast-talking North Carolinian by birth. He notes many more things throughout the course of one-and-a-half triumphant hours, but it’s hard to make them out because he’s drowned by whistles and cheers. It’s the sound of vindication, and it must be music to Future Islands’ ears.
From their intro tune to the final notes of Spirit, a goth-pop take on Kraftwerk, this band of 2014 come across as fantastically old-fashioned underdogs. It’s not just their sound – plangent, percolating synth-pop with its roots in the Cure, New Order and the 80s charts. FI come to this bigger stage unadorned. There is no set to speak of, no band name on Mike Lowry’s drum kit, nothing fancy – save a guest vocalist, Katrina Ford, from support band Celebration, who duets with Herring on Doves and Fall from Grace. Impassive keyboard player Gerrit Welmers stands behind a synth rig so chunky it looks 30 years old. Inscrutable bassist William Cashion only moves his face when his bottle of fizzy drink threatens to douse his instrument. Lowry rattles what look like clacking wooden snakes during the intro to A Song for Our Grandfathers. They are hugely effective, and hugely affecting.
The band have sold out one date at the Roundhouse next spring and added another. Love for their fourth album’s sweeping keyboard-pop does not seem to be in any danger of running out. Some of their latest fans might have come for the exhibitionist singer, you figure, but they will stay, thanks to the power of Future Islands’ danceable melancholy.
