“People Who Aren’t There Anymore”
Future Islands’ new album helps men’s hearts heal
Cringe, but cool: Future Islands with singer Samuel T. Herring (l.)
© Frank Hamilton
Love is gone and life is crap? The bittersweet songs by the US band Future Islands help you get back up again.
A few friends meet again. Men in their mid-40s and older, the area where life has already gone through a few revolutions and where smaller wishes remain from the big dreams of the past. Love, for example – you no longer want to find it at that age, you want to hold on to what’s still there. The friends are sitting in a bar and drinking gin and tonic. On the fifth or sixth drink, one of the friends says that she has left him. The woman is gone and love with her, and yes, he now lives in painful freedom. “I feel like I’m 15 and I’m back with the strays,” he says.
When such friends meet and bathe not in their nostalgia but in their melancholy in gin and tonics or other drinks, and if it doesn’t matter whether one of them is rich or not so rich, there is always a mood in such conversations that women don’t understand because men do Don’t talk to women that way, but have their own codes.
Wonderful male melancholy
Which brings us to this band called Future Islands, which sounds pretty much what that little story up there sounds like. Wonderful male melancholy about life, sometimes desperate, sometimes resigned, always getting up and performed in a mature wave guitar pop that sometimes brings to mind the sound of The Cure or the absoluteness of some REM songs.
“People Who Aren’t There Anymore” is the seventh album by the Baltimore group, which formed in 2008 and whose sound is described as synthpop, which the musicians reject. Their style is difficult to describe, they say.
An album about these breaks in life
Future Islands make listenable, straight-from-the-soul music, with every song having its massive centerpiece in the voice of singer Samuel T. Herring. Because he doesn’t just sing, he lets the songs explode in front of the microphone and on stage with every cell in his body and also falls into quite funny meaning moves, like those you can see at teenage parties when dad dances there too. Very brave cringe, so to speak.
When Samuel T. Herring was writing the new songs, his girlfriend left him. And because with Future Islands everything flows from the soul directly into the instruments, “People Who Aren’t There Anymore” is an album about these breaks in life. “Every day without you feels like it’s close to goodbye,” it says.
But it’s not the whining whine of middle-aged white men whose women run away because they’ve simply become too boring with them or because the fitness trainer seemed like a better promise. No, Future Islands have found an adult groove for these crises of masculinities that orchestrates and underpins life as it is. You don’t have to listen to the songs word for word, who does that… The rough force of Herring’s voice makes the listener (male, middle-aged) think that someone feels like himself.
It’s, says Herring, like coming back to a place you know after ten years. But you yourself have become a different person. When listening to Future Islands, you could also hear the sigh of the great Danish thinker Sören Kierkegaard: “He who I am wistfully greets the one I would like to be.”