Music review: Future Islands, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

This was a show filled with earnest intensity and relentlessly gorgeous music, writes David Pollock
Samuel Herring of Future Islands PIC: Paul R Giunta/Invision/AP/ShutterstockSamuel Herring of Future Islands PIC: Paul R Giunta/Invision/AP/Shutterstock
Samuel Herring of Future Islands PIC: Paul R Giunta/Invision/AP/Shutterstock

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 lines of the song were subverted by singer Samuel T Herring’s jagged, heartfelt dad-at-an-indie-disco dancing and his discordant, punctuating death metal roar.

The Future Islands live experience suggests that 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 performance from 37-year-old Herring remains a wonderful thing to behold, a burst of Northern soul physicality set to music for wistful, nostalgic synthpop romantics.

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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 two years and everything we went through… a song about 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, from the joyful New Wave groove of A Dream of You and Me to the sheer uplifting ache of Ancient Water.

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