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Like the National’s Matt Berninger, Future Islands frontman Samuel F. Herring sounded jaded and long in the tooth years before he actually was. Part of the appeal of songs like the Baltimore band’s 2014 viral smash “Seasons” was the incongruity of hearing a cookie-monster growl from a man who looked more like a milquetoast accountant than a rock star.
Future Islands’s People Who Aren’t There Anymore, then, sounds divided against its own impulses toward accessibility, with Herring’s voice—which often chokes words off and battles against the songs’ melodies—subverting the band’s instincts to write simple, catchy pop music. What’s more, their blend of ’80s pop and arena rock is starting to feel formulaic.
Although a familiar quiet-verse/loud-chorus structure is used too frequently throughout the album—“Say Goodbye” features a verse where Herring sings over a minimal arrangement of bass, drums, and keyboards—this approach effectively calls attention to the music’s melancholic underpinnings. “The Tower” and “Deep in the Night” might be love songs, but mourning is the central theme of People Who Aren’t There Anymore. The moving “Give Me the Ghost Back,” for example, memorializes a friend who died of a drug overdose.
Unfortunately, Future Islands’s most melodramatic tendencies get the better of them. As on past albums like 2017’s The Far Field, the quieter passages here are projected with too much force to either serve as a contrast to the songs’ more bombastic sections or fully convey the import of the lyrics. This grows especially tiring on tracks like “The Fight” and “Corner of My Eye,” which are synth-pop equivalents of stadium power ballads. Were the music itself able to match the downbeat undertones of Herring’s words, it might pack a bigger punch.
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The post Future Islands <em>People Who Aren’t There Anymore</em> Review: Bombastic Synth-Pop for Sad Dads appeared first on Slant Magazine.
