Future Islands - The Far Field
The Quietus
The first hour or so at the wheel on a road trip, you feel invincible. Like you could drive for days. A couple of hours later, the rolling monotony starts to wear. Not long after that, your legs cramp, your butt aches, and your mind starts to drift away into an empty nothing. That doesn’t get much better when you stack days and days of that in a row on tour, playing in front of thousands for brief, shining moments, and then returning to seclusion at the wheel of a tour van. It seems to have worn particularly on Samuel T. Herring. After Singles (and, let’s face it, Letterman) launched Future Islands to the indie stratosphere, Herring found himself on that constantly unwinding highway, and the open road anxiety started weighing heavy. But then the other thing about perpetually driving is that you’re always rolling away from somewhere and something, a fact that Herring knows well and something that powers Future Islands’ new album, The Far Field.
Though Singles was their turning point in terms of massive recognition, this record has a lot more to do with their 2010 effort, In Evening Air. That album shares a title with a poem by Theodore Roethke, uses a painting by former band member Kymia Nawabi for its cover, and was fueled by Herring’s heartbreak after a long-term relationship ended over the strain of the touring life. The Far Field, meanwhile, takes it title from the Roethke collection that poem comes from, its cover was painted by Nawabi, and yet again Herring deals with heartbreak and the tolls of constant touring. In fact, at times it would seem it’s the same heartbreak still dogging him, which gives that much more power to the feeling of constant, taut-nerved movement that Future Islands produce here.
“Left out on the road eight years ago/ And you left too, but I never really thought that you would really go,” he begins on ‘Beauty of the Road’. The timeline is clear, the narrative bare. Later, he shows what’s been happening since that second album: “For years now, I’ve been hunting you down.” The attempts at reconnection flash in and out between more pain and anxiety, the lonely days and nights grinding away. ‘Ran’ again repeats the trend of movement away, in title and lyrics. “I can’t take this world without, this world without you … On these roads, out of love, so it goes,” Herring booms. Later, he’s still running on the buoyant ‘North Star’, though this time seemingly toward something, rather than running away: “Kept me running, from the world, and from myself/ You gave me second chance and hopes to run to/ I couldn’t bare to spend another day without you.”
That song, tellingly, details the story of Herring being unable to fly to see his love, so instead driving through a blizzard. In an unexpected and clever twist, the band juxtaposes that crushing feeling with near tropical synths and bouncing rhythm. It’s a breath of fresh air musically, distinct from its surroundings, but yet so perfectly in line thematically. The mystic ‘Black Rose’, meanwhile, was written on a long drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains as Herring traveled to visit his brother. One way or another, driving and motion are the forces behind the entire record, appropriate for the follow-up to an album that led the band to massive success but also hundreds of dates touring in support of it.
Musically, most of these songs work toward a similar loping tempo; listening to the album song after song begins to feel like that constant motion that propels and entangles Herring. The moments of catharsis and change pop up like roadside attractions between the miles of scenery out the window. As he does throughout the band’s catalog, Herring returns again and again to images of nature, to poetic lines through which he can manipulate his voice to achieve the greatest emotional resonance, whether that’s a Waits-ian growl or a Tom Jones falsetto. Gerritt Welmers and William Cashion build sturdy platforms, synthpop tunes hued in purple and red, ebbing and flowing like the ocean tide.
Throughout the album, Herring repeats words and phrases, but none pops up as frequently as “you.” Sometimes that person buoys him, gives him something to be moving towards, but more frequently he seems to fret over the fact that all this moving is drawing him further away. Some of the most emotionally fraught moments come, though, when the distance overtakes the “you” entirely, chief among them ‘Through the Roses’. The song plays out like a musical suicide note, Herring fighting the temptation to “look inside my wrist.” He tragically discusses “the clutch of nothing/ the curse of wanting.” And, at the song’s apex, the howling, growling, and poetic imagery all fall away, Herring just repeating how scared he is.
The problem with general anxiety, depression, and road trips is that they often stretch on for ages without any specific moment of impact, the hours stretching on with dwindling hope for light at the end of the road. But if you’re going to be stuck driving, Future Islands at least know well to make the pace entertaining. The songs do roll by at a largely consistent tempo, but Welmers and Cashion have a tried and tested formula for propulsive electropop that though not always groundbreaking never fails. It’s telling that they so perfectly fit Debbie Harry into ‘Shadows’, the tight drum pattern and glistening synths leaving perfect room for her trademark arch and growl.
Though Harry interlocks so dynamically into that song, she far overshadows Herring, primarily because of what a change of pace she provides. The Far Field – and the band’s entire catalog, really – forces the frontman to relive terrible moments of his life through funky grooves and wobbly-kneed dance moves. That’s a fascinating formula, but the wonder and shock of his howl and sigh fades some repeated this frequently That’s true too of that musical formula; the record’s 12 songs feels like a few too many, with ‘Black Rose’, ‘Day Glow Fire’, and ‘Aladdin’ fading into obscurity. They’re fine songs, well composed, but lack any sort of catharsis or viable differentiation, and blur into an amalgamation of “Future Islands song” synth fuzz.
But even through these murkiest times, all is not lost. After the bleakest moments of ‘Through the Roses’, he finds solace in a repeated message: “We can pull through together.” In interviews, he’s explained that the “we” includes the audience, and the fact that he’s found communion with a larger presence rather than the “you” that has so troubled him is powerful. Though there’s plenty of desperation and fear, Herring does show some real hope and positivity at times. Sometimes that comes from a presumed reunion with the love he’s been away from for so long, no matter how brief that may be. But it’s also in taking on a new direction for his constant movement. “First steps to being better is doing the smallest things,” he sings on ‘Ancient Water’.
The album rolls at a constant low boil, the agitation poking and prodding under the skin, not unlike the lingering, uncertain love. The Far Field isn’t explosive in its emotion, nor is it wallowing; it’s just constantly rolling forward, the wheels propelling Future Islands onward to the horizon. That all plays out perfectly on ‘Cave’, a song that opens with Welmer’s bronzey synths and Cashion’s rubbery bass and never looks back. “Is this a desperate wish for dying/ Or a wish that dying cease?/ The fear that keeps me going and going/ Is the same fear that brings me to my knees,” Herring sings. And, in the world of Future Islands, that duality is crucial. Herring and co. know that there is no light without dark, especially as they keep driving through the hazy sunlight somewhere between setting and rising.
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Tue Apr 25 11:16:17 GMT 2017Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Future Islands
The Far Field
[4AD; 2017]
Rating: 4/5
“Instead of sharpening punk and post-punk’s cutting edge, these bands blunted it; rather than provoke, oppose, and negate mainstream pop tastes, they seem to have reworked their sounds to accommodate these norms. And they accommodated them quite well — these were all charting, and often chart-topping, singles. If anything, their sound had become excessively normal.”
– Robin James, “Neoliberal Noise: Attali, Foucault, & the Biopolitics of Uncool”
“When a rock ‘n’ roll group attains success, there is typically a fascination with its origins. “How did such a phenomenon come to pass?” everyone asks, simply because making a group is so difficult, and finding persons with the correct creative chemistry and sense of mutual commitment so unusual. The origin stories of rock & roll groups have therefore taken their place alongside the historical and religious myths of time immemorial.”
- Ian F. Svenonius, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group
My introduction to Future Islands was like that of many. One way or another, I found the clip of Samuel T. Herring crooning, howling, and growling for Letterman and his audience. It’s one thing to do all the moving that a seated mid-day studio audience lacks, but it’s another to gesticulate to the heavens and hope the divinity transcends the TV set. Here, watch it again:
It’s a gimmicky hook. It’s also stunning, near virtuosity, and bafflingly difficult to interpret. Herring carries a clumsy masculinity through his stoic on-stage drama, invoking Morrissey as Hamlet carrying Yorick’s skull. I remember — later that summer — watching Herring lock eyes with the missing skull of Yorick (which he’d just extracted from his throat, through his jaw, by way of representation, a trick of the body), sun setting behind the main stage of FYF Fest, situated on the black top parking lot of Los Angeles’s Olympic Park. Perhaps he was singing the descent of the then-recent “Fall From Grace”: “We slowly fade away/ We slowly fade away.” Herring presented an endless ricochetting epiphany. He seemed to be relentlessly surged and resurged by the washy, unsexy post-post-punk that sat below him. He was impressive. He was devoted. He was reaching new heights, and he was decidedly uncool.
That was 2014 and, of course, this is now. The Far Field arrives with those several years compressed to a few unfazed blinks. Future Islands (not as a band, but as a piece of its with its own momentum and trajectory) doesn’t seem aware of a world outside of it. The Far Field is hardly a new chapter, just the dialogue beyond a scene break. With three years compressed to the tiny stars of a mid-page three-asterisk ellipsis, we start to feel that the entire act (the length of a band’s career) has already been written. With a slow fade back to consciousness, Future Islands release the breath they took in 2014 with Singles. “Aladdin” sounds like nothing out of the ordinary, introduces no new elements. The Far Field continues with very few ruptures of this blanket texture of uniformity.
And such would be a clear element of critique if it weren’t exactly what generates critical interest for the band in the first place. Future Islands appear to value consistency and brand recognition far more than the production of singular punctuated moments (singles, hits, hooks, solos, drops). They have encircled their own style that appears either thoughtfully restrained or thoughtlessly constrained (by way of shallow influences and/or uncreative methodology). Their earlier output as well as Herring’s surprising fanaticism toward underground hip hop leads me to believe the former is at play. So Future Islands circumlocutes the sound and the structures at their essence without a flag-bearing essential hit to anchor the operation.
Here, my mind travels to The Ramones who, of course, had many standout hits, but who never seemed to fully tire of the formula and chord progressions that produced them. Imagine a hypothetical Ramones song that has never been written but of which every other Ramones song is a representation. Or perhaps imagine the creative impulse that guided The Ramones to be like a good starter for sourdough bread, sometimes better nourished, sometimes more successfully rendered into bread but always the same at its center. The same can be applied to Nickelback, Morton Feldman, Kool Keith, Agnes Martin, Emily Dickinson, Napalm Death, Gertrude Stein, and the mid-to-late paintings of Monet. Many of which have certain well-renowned singular works but are artists who really can’t be understood without the context of their oeuvre.
As such, nothing on The Far Field is remotely innovative or boundary pushing (in the broad scope of music at large as well as the narrow scope of Future Islands’ own narrative). It has its brief dissonances, odd features, and outliers (the strange dip in the chorus melody of “Beauty of the Road,” the background effects on “Cave,” the Cyndi Lauper bounce of “North Star,” the carefully detuned synth behind “Ancient Water,” and Debbie Harry’s feature on “Shadows”), but ultimately, it is safe and moralistic without suggestion otherwise. Even as a vessel for Herring’s performative antics (which really serve as the hook of it all), the whole presentation is relatively shockless and nonsubversive. The Far Field is carried by light catharsis, diffused and mild-tempered fun, virtuosic vocal delivery, and steel-clean production.
The album’s largest fault is that it is generally unremarkable despite this adept musicianship and heartfelt approach. This fault, however, surrounds us daily as a Fordist argument for the convenience, consistency, and comfort of reliable product as we come to disregard whatever it is that that product lacks (Ford Motors, Starbucks, McDonald’s, IKEA, Vans, Coca-Cola), and that ultimately evolves to the hollow brand for which product is just about besides the point (Facebook, Buzzfeed, Medium, other less blatantly dubious web services as well as several of the brands already listed above). As such, Future Islands tastefully brush shoulders with the unsensational and guileless media available from a screen in Denny’s or at the gas pump. There is so much more to Future Islands that is worth dissection: Herring’s complex dramatic performance of a gyrational (anti-)masculinity, the politics of the publicly hard-working band, a thorough analysis of what really is going on behind all the on-stage gestural drama, and an evaluation of the act of selling out as it operates currently. While these avenues interest me, they are superfluous to any album Future Islands has produced. Much like how the quality and content of a new Frappuccino® flavor is never more essential to its release than the fact that it is new (thus perpetuating ad campaigns, novelty branding, and company growth), The Far Field potentiates further exploration for Future Islands as a performance group. Thus is the logical extreme of the classic record production cycle (e.g. release an album and tour in support of the album and repeat with singles and television appearances along the way) for the pragmatic post-industry artist.
The Guardian 80
(4AD)
Before becoming unlikely stars in 2014 on the back of frontman Samuel T Herring’s extraordinarily impassioned performance of Seasons (Waiting on You) on David Letterman’s show, Baltimore three-piece Future Islands had released four well-received albums of synth-driven indie. Their fifth doesn’t deviate greatly: Gerrit Welmers and William Cashion create lush soundscapes that owe much to the more muscular end of 80s AOR, while Herring adds the vocal bombast. Although they come close with the urgency of Ran and Cave, nothing here quite matches up to Seasons, but then that bar was set ridiculously high. There’s only one misstep: the slower Candles turns into a dispiriting trudge. Otherwise, The Far Field is another accomplished, engaging set.
Continue reading... Sun Apr 09 07:00:01 GMT 2017Pitchfork 76
Three years later, everyone is still talking about Samuel T. Herring’s dancing. If the details of indie rock’s most beloved fairytale have somehow escaped you, in March 2014, Future Islands performed their song “Seasons (Waiting on You)” on “Letterman.” Vibrating with intensity, Herring beat his chest, growled, and bobbed like the sneakiest featherweight in a heartfelt display that went viral and minted the Baltimore trio’s fortunes. The cult band became a fiercely in-demand live act—they played their 1000th show while on the Singles tour, and recently said that they could still be touring that record if they wanted to. The accidental origins of Herring’s dance came in 2004, when a car ran over his foot before a show. By taking this glorious accident primetime, you can’t help but wonder if he’s slightly shot himself in it, too.
Becoming public property on your fifth album is a tricky proposition—harder, possibly, than the so-called difficult second album after a breakthrough debut. By Singles, much of Future Islands’ fundamental development was behind them. The jittery mania of their 2008 debut Wave Like Home had smoothed into starry-eyed synth-pop melodrama, where New Order’s bass lines met the pop fantasias of OMD and A-Ha. As Future Islands reached maturity, their fanbase ballooned on the back of a caricature and a single. How do you move on from that? Do you stay warm in the relatively secure spotlight? Or do you twist away and risk losing the more fair-weather elements? How many bands even take creative leaps 14 years after hopping in a van together, as they first did as Art Lord & the Self - Portraits? The Far Field, Future Islands’ fifth album, skews towards the former.
If Singles stepped up to meet the world, The Far Field mostly shrinks at its gaze. Future Islands have talked about the exhaustion and doubts that arose on their long tour, and this record’s insular focus plays like a protective shield. The scaffolding remains, but the upholstery is threadbare. Though the sound is familiar, the structures are less bombastic and their former gleam is somewhat muted. And as he agonizes over the legacy of two failed relationships—one recent, one canonical—Herring sounds utterly defeated. Although their circumstances are different, his forlorn performance recalls that of Nick Cave on Skeleton Tree and the unbearable sadness of diminished titans. While it doesn’t break much new musical ground, and plays against Future Islands’ reputation for excess, The Far Field’s breathtaking sorrow is transformative.
The album takes more than its name from a poem by American writer Theodore Roethke. (Future Islands’ 2010 record In Evening Air is also named after one of his works.) Herring has replaced his simple lyrical scheme—sun/moon, day/night—with knottier, more poetic lines. Sometimes they’re too much. “No lack of ‘wouldn’t’ could be my undoing/No lack of trying/No lack of sighing, ‘loo,’” he rasps on the despondent “Aladdin,” kind of proving his point. Yet his grandiose phrasing conveys the desperation he feels as he grapples with lost relationships—and more so, with what it means to live with longing and regret at his core. “Is this a desperate wish for dying, or a wish that dying cease?” he asks no one in particular on “Cave,” letting Gerrit Welmers’ synth wash over his question. “The fear that keeps me going and going and going/Is the same fear that brings me to my knees.” Simply put, on the hurtling “Ran,” “What’s a song without you/When every song I write is about you?”
Herring grieves, loses faith, and flounders across The Far Field, and nowhere more so than on “Through the Roses,” the album’s emotional peak. He has candidly referred to it as “a suicide song,” written on a long drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains. “It just hit me in that moment,” he told Mojo, “this great sense of loneliness. I’d reached all my goals but all I found was the same loneliness.” He plots the distance between his joyous public persona and private sorrow, and exposes the sadness behind the spectacle: “I’m scared,” he sings, his voice cracking. “That I can’t pull through.” As “the clutch of nothing, the curse of wanting takes me whole,” he contemplates cutting his wrists. Herring has always lucidly understood the band’s appeal—that his unabashed exuberance allows their audiences to let out their repressed emotions, too. The naked pain of “Through the Roses” is both a beautiful song, and a profound gesture of trust and generosity from Herring. “But we can pull through together, together, together,” he insists at the end, and you believe him.
The mood lightens in The Far Field’s second half as Herring does his best to move on. A impish, glassy rhythm peps up “North Star,” and on “Candles,” Future Islands try something totally different—a dubby yacht rock number that sounds almost comically seductive, but finds Herring serving up one of his quintessentially moony tributes. It works perfectly. “Baby I know,” he croons like a regular lounge lizard, “a little candle like you don’t deserve the hurt you’re going through.” And while it’s sort of a shame that Future Islands didn’t fill The Far Field with 12 songs as gorgeous and immediate as “Shadows,” the sadness that came before only makes Herring’s duet with Debbie Harry all the more wonderful. Hearing his voice age and tremble throughout the record gives it gravitas. Hearing Harry, at 71, sound wise and saucy and full of promise makes its hopefulness seem real. “These old shadows parade you like a fool!” she exclaims, trying to lure him back into the light.
Future Islands could easily have become single-trick jesters after “Seasons,” but The Far Field finds salvation in tragedy. Speaking with The New York Times recently, Herring said that he hadn’t yet worked out dance moves for this album. “It’s been difficult,” he said. “Hopefully people aren’t bummed out, like, ‘Where’s the new thing?’” You’d hope, for an album this tender, that this time their presence alone will be enough.
The Guardian 60
(4AD)
Samuel T Herring’s hiccupping vocal mannerisms recall the late-night ennui of Tindersticks’ Stuart Staples, and what Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer might once have described as “singing in the club style”. Along with Herring’s distinctive delivery, Future Islands’ appeal rests on their anthemic love songs. The Baltimore band’s 2014 single Seasons (Waiting on You) topped end-of-year polls, and tracks on The Far Field such as Cave share a similar tempo, wearily lovelorn lyrics and impassioned pitch. Then there’s William Cashion’s Peter Hook-ish bass, which often seems like the lead instrument, bubbling around amid washes of synth. But while their fifth album is not a giant leap forwards, all their essential elements are intact and thriving, and it reaffirms their mastery of modern synthpop. There’s not a great deal of variety, though the lovers’ rock of Candles creates some breathing space. And Debbie Harry duets with Herring on Shadows, sounding more Marianne Faithfull/grande dame than the Blondie pop princess of old.
Continue reading... Thu Apr 06 20:30:13 GMT 2017Drowned In Sound 50
Circles. Fucking circles, I tell you.
Three years ago, Xiu Xiu and Future Islands both dropped albums in the same month. One was a fucking nightmare, and I mean that as a bona fide compliment. The other was a fucking narcotic, an opal opioid bubble wherein normalcore enthusiast (remember normalcore?) Samuel Herring strained his steely vocal chords to push against the slumber. No one would have cared about the latter, though – me included – if the dude that booked gigs on David Letterman’s show hadn’t tapped them, thus depriving the world of Herring’s zoned-in trance dance to 'Seasons (Waiting On You)'. Once THAT went viral in the thinkpiece circuit, everyone and their mother wanted to cover Singles - which was Future Islands’ third LP by then, but for all the converts as slack-jawed and speechless as Letterman, may as well have been a debut.
Fast-forward to today, and – circles! Once again, Xiu Xiu and Future Islands drop albums roughly within a month of each other. Forget, if you haven’t heard it yet, is not only effin’ great, but a triumphant clarion call to old form for Jamie Stewart – less slow-mo chainsaw massacre, more beautiful rust-coated decay. And clearly the product of an extended hiatus, streaked with the sweat and cum poured into that seismic shift. Future Islands, though? Put it this way: give a band a bone for its Cloroxed-kitchen-counter appeal, its gilded storybook prose, and what do you THINK they’ll do in three years’ time? Cruise control, that’s what. Cruise control for the guffawing masses that can’t discern between concept and gimmick. There are actually TWO songs with the word 'rose' in the title, if that tells you anything (and it should).
Circles! Fucking circles! See, behind this vanilla-scented velvet lies wasted potential. Before Singles, Future Islands actually tried to be different, leaning away from the groove and further out into humble drones, simpler silence. Kinda like New Order, you might say, and I would, too – not that In Evening Air and On the Water equate to Movement and Power, Corruption & Lies, but not even our protagonists can deny their most obvious muse. (Hopeless romanticism? Check. Commitment to kinetic motion? Check. Unconventional synth warbling? Check, check, check.)
The difference, though, is that Herring has proven himself as a far more fascinating front man – and this is what really irks me about The Far Field. Like, dude can rap. In the interim between Singles, he’s been moonlighting as Hemlock Ernst for sundry folk, and actually not embarrassing himself. I listened rigorously to Open Mike Eagle’s Hella Personal Film Festival last year to see if I could catch the obviously inept white guy in the mix, but I couldn’t. Damn.
So, my question is: why does Future Islands have to coast in this Xanax-induced lullaby land? I mean, I’ll admit, there’s no dent or ding in The Far Field, not one speck of grit in the creases, and your toe taps involuntarily to its pulse. And Herring does write about more stuff than love, like existential angst in 'Cave' and an ageing fairy tale hero in 'Aladdin' (not to mention, he lets out his best growl on the former – though that’s a mere whimper compared to, say, 'Fall from Grace'). But, apart from the new wave prom dance of 'Candles', The Far Field plays out like a treadmill – same tempos, same whining siren wails from the synths, same bass undulation. 'Day Fire Glow' achieves the uncanny by merging New Order’s 'Ceremony' with Florence and the Machine’s 'Dog Days', but that’s the only point worth arching a brow at. Otherwise, we’re guided down a lily Mobius strip, over and over, till the sun comes up and yr love is in your goddamned arms again.
Circles, see? That’s all Future Islands is now, and that’s all you’ll find in The Far Field. A locked groove, a locked wheel, a locked shackle. On record, anyway; I don’t doubt that Herring can unbind these fettered loops on stage. And maybe you’re fine with circles, anyway, if you’re the sort that hangs music like silk curtains to the back of yr mind. But three years should’ve yielded more than this.
Wed Apr 05 13:42:16 GMT 2017