Future Islands
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
Future Islands remain the most thoroughly diverse and richly expressive one-hit wonders of recent times. If anyone knows one thing about the Baltimore quartet, it’s still – eight years on from the event – that truly wonderful live performance of their song Seasons (Waiting On You) on David Letterman’s show in 2014, where the sleek, yearning synthpop was subverted by singer Samuel T Herring’s jagged, heartfelt dad-at-an-indie-disco dancing and his discordant, punctuating death metal roar.
This continues to be the band’s overriding style, but they also make repeating a similar thing feel effortlessly fresh and exciting in a way few other groups can match. The performancefrom37-year-old Herring remains a wonderful thing to behold, a burst of Northern soul physicality set to music for wistful, nostalgic synthpop romantics.
He shakes his hips at the audience during Peach, performs tip-toe balletic skips during Waking, powers into a frankly punishing Cossack dance routine amid the well named Balance, and flips energetically into the Funky Worm during Long Flight’s growling, low-end groove. Most often, he just slaps his breastbone so loud that it pops through the microphone.
This earnest intensity is what remains lovable about the group, six albums into their career (ten, if you count their obscure past life as Art Lord and the Self-portraits). Each song introduction sounds like a religious affirmation: “This is a song for the last twoyearsandeverythingwe wentthrough…asongabout being a child and being so afraid you don't know nothing… a song about a person who went on tour for four months and when they got back they found they'd lost everything they loved; it's a true story.”
Amid it all, despite the singularly huge response to Seasons, it was a show filled with relentlessly gorgeous music.