Future Islands
All Together Now, Sunday
★★★★☆
On a rainy afternoon, Future Islands bring the sunshine. With the Irish summer unleashing its signature existential gloom upon All Together Now, champion dad dancer Samuel T Herring and his bandmates come to the rescue with a joyous hour of soul-baring indie pop.
Squaring the trickiest circle in music, Future Islands have a knack for sad songs that make you happy. That’s particularly true of their latest album, People Who Aren’t There Any More, a dissection of Herrings’s break-up from his former partner, the Swedish actor Julia Ragnarsson, that sends the listener away feeling several feet taller.
As the drizzle threatens to upgrade to something more unpleasant, the four-piece open with King of Sweden, a new track brimming with heartbreak and here illuminated by Herring’s jerking, hip-swivelling moves.
He’s quite the dervish – a cross between a mid-life-crisis-themed kabuki show and an Elvis impersonator who’s just discovered disco. It’s a broad turn but one that feeds off the group’s swirling, synth-driven melancholy – a yin-yang dynamic that should be a mess yet that Herring sells with his unstoppable charisma.
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Herring explains that he can’t quite dance like he wants to. “I’m gonna bust my ass up here,” he says as the downpour proceeds. “It’s slippery as hell.”
Even with the safety guard on, however, Herring is magnetic, and his refusal to be self-conscious about his manic gyrations gives The Tower and Ran an underdog charm.
The performance is just about done – the drizzle, alas, is not – when they reach for Seasons (Waiting for You), the 2014 surprise hit that introduced Future Islands to a world beyond the Baltimore art-pop scene.
Herring shuffles (but does not slide), the crowd bops along, and the video screen picks out a giant Pikachu Pokémon dancing among the audience. For all creatures, great and small, it’s a Sunday-evening triumph to savour – a ray of joy when we need it the most.
