The new Future Islands album is something I keep hearing people describe as “derivative, but in a good way.”
Some of their earlier music sounds more… I don’t know… unabashedly 80’s inflected, but trying to pinpoint exactly what In Evening Air sounds “like” gives me something of a headache. It’s familiar, like a ratty old shirt you forgot you had at the bottom of your closet. Maybe it’s not yours, it’s someone else’s, but you feel like it could be yours and you’re content to wear it for the time being. I’m content to listen to this for the time being, even though I think the singer’s voice sounds borderline unlistenable on half the songs. Look at these clowns:
Sensual Harassment must be a marketing scam waiting to explode. They are so slick sounding and all of their songs so far they have given freely on the Internet (just 5 songs total, it seems). This Christmas, their song Soldier, from a free digital EP, got listened to some 60+ times on my iPod while driving around Phoenix for hours at night looking for places that might serve a decent dessert at 3 am. A song called Fever that was more recently released—again for free on the internet—is getting a similar amount of play now while laying around my grandparents’ house with everyone else asleep in southern New Jersey. It’s certainly not breaking any new ground, being some weird conflation of The Cure and maybe… I don’t know… Camouflage… but it’s pretty and vacuous and sometimes that’s good enough.