Music

Future Islands are making the year’s best pop songs a reality

Sian Rowe | Sunday 5 September, 2010 19:38

A quick chat with Future Islands front man Samuel Herring could easily turn into a 3 hour discussion about what it means to be making DIY music today. Jumping between topics without pausing for breath, he explains how bands can go on world tours but still come home with no cash, laughs wickedly about how he wants bands to devise an acappella version of their album (just to fuck with people of course) and talks at length about the merits of “being taken seriously”. Like any good rock star, somewhere along the way he nips out to his car to get a cigarette. At another he disappears completely.

The three piece – formed in 2006 following a relocation to Baltimore – play music that doesn’t sit still for long either. Listening is fun but challenging, with each wild inflection in Herring’s voice ushering in a different style from post punk to new wave, synth to melancholy opera. Sometimes they’re playing cosmic cowboys (Long Flight) at others hula dancing machines (Tin Man). They’ve written one of the year’s best pop songs in “Swept Aside” but join the gloomy shoegaze revival on “Inch of Dust”. The groups they are associated with, featuring “B-more” bands Dan Deacon, Double Dagger and Thank You, are equally hard to pin down, each one of them amazing audiences with live shows that demonstrate what the city’s creative and “get involved” community is all about.

“I rarely find that I’m always happy,” he says. “I’m inwardly working through some problem or another. The music allows me to work those things out, but contrasting that with keyboard pop causes there to be some strange playfulness.”

In the work surrounding “In Evening Air” that playfulness is definitely on the wane, even if the “strangeness” is thriving. The psychedelic green screen videos that accompanied “Follow You” and “Beach Form” have been replaced by lingering looks at life on the coast and on the dancefloor, devised by Brookylyn based director Jay Buim. “The ‘As I Fall’ video by Mary-Helena Clark is step in the right direction,” he concludes.

But some reviewers, stuck on the frontman’s colourful stage persona, still aren’t convinced. Is it really just a big act? “No, it’s all me,” he laughs. “When i first started writing, years ago, I would sometimes take on Richard Butler’s voice though. That would always give me some good material.”

Having developed a booming vocal and tendency to stare directly at the front row, Herring has been described as OTT on more than one occasion. “That term can be irritating but I have to take it as constructive criticism,” he says. “I know that I can be a little too much for some, and yes, those videos take away from the message a little bit, but we’re moving forward.”

It’s Dan Deacon that they’ve taken this resolve from, despite making subtler sounds than the electronic wizard. They met Deacon when their previous band split and moved to the city just as his career took off. While newly formed Future Islands figured out what to do next, he’d started touring with great results. “He was getting a lot of attention because he spent so much time out on the road, honing his craft,” Herring explains, “so we told ourselves, no more jobs, no more school, only music. Our new motto is ‘tour hard, lose your mind, gain something more’.”

Now between two big tours, the break has seen them unveil an acoustic project, and with more to come it’s clear Herring has come to his conclusion; there’ll be no sipping cocktails on the balcony, no posing in trendy bars and no wild parties for Future Islands this year, just more moving and forceful pop music. “Although I decided to play some baseball yesterday,” he says. “That was some good clean fun”.

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