Future Islands - On The Water

its so weird and sad when music nerds confronted with a vocalist who has a unique and/or unusual voice just go with "cant sing"

like, he is singing. his voice is singing songs he wrote.

"Confronted" would imply I've actually listened to it, I was just mocking the discourse.

cool.

he can sing. but can he sing?

he sings on-key and quite well, gr80 otm. people generally don't know anything at all about singing tho and by good singing often mean "did it sound like somebody doing the national anthem at a ballpark"

otm. is timbre the correct word for what is turning people off? bc I agree that the pitch seems good.

i guess discussions of pitch are kind of ridiculous. we could find out if he was singing off-pitch by mixing his vocals with a near-perfect reference (like a synthesizer), recording the experiment (say on a talkshow), and then listening for a beat frequency.

a lot of the disparaging terms itt are the things that I really like about this band. like say Dan Deacon or Andrew W.K. they are one of those groups to which the first question is always "are they serious about this?" and the answer is "yes, and it's awesome"

It's the singer's job to sell the song, and if you didn't buy it, claims of "amateurism" though not precisely correct are not off-base, imo. I appreciate the "I never got into his voice" dismissal because it assumes a certain position of philistinism on the critic's part

That said, this was a vocal grand slam for a network TV appearance

last 2 posts very otm

I don't recall saying he was off pitch. People at karaoke aren't necessarily off pitch. Can I say he sounds like a goofball? Or is that another Pandora's box?

sure.

So weird to think of people getting upset about a loose hammy performance of a corny synth song on letterman with anything less than considered respect

Being treated with anything less, I mean

yeah it really is bizarre that instead of a bunch of "actually this is just amateur Paul Young" thinkpieces people saying "woah that was a great performance"

totally agree, man

people ARE saying

How dare you suggest I'm asking for thinkpieces of any kind

anyway the official video linked upthread is really cool.

ive posted before about how big a fan i am of documentary-style music videos and this one is right up my alley

And dude I am not shocked in the least that indie folks are blown away by hometown faves getting to do their shtick on late night TV. In my day you had to stay up for it, the kids don't know what with their blogs and dvrs

let's be clear. in every post, you assume that every future islands fan is a 24 yr old indie fan from the band's hometown. you then give advice about how these fans are gonna "go into the shit" up ahead like a disillusioned war general.

Actually that's not fair, forgot you could program the VHS player.

Dude I'm responding to Bernie's comments. This is the context I was provided.

After hearing that Letterman song it stuck in my memory although it almost immediately became a mashup of itself and the J. Mitchell "riding on the freeway" song (Coyote). Tempo thing I suppose.

indie bro David Letterman audibly blown away by the right-in-his-usual-wheelhouse performance. just more home cooking from the indie front

croup your critiques here are so weird and wrong - every fuckin indie band on the planet does late night TV, the buzz here is not "oh boy the indie band came up!" it's the actual performance. it's a focused, engaged, wholly inhabited performance (in a genre not exactly known for those) by a dude who (pretty surprisingly, imo; cameras are hard) works the camera like he was raised in front it. vocally, he's both unique (the weird death growls thrown in van morrison-style like they come from some personal vocabulary of what counts as emphasis; good singing is in part about finding a way to sound like yourself instead of just another person who can hit the notes) and in a tradition that's if not unknown, kind of a weird pocket: singers with soul tics/tendencies in a synthy environment. San Serac does this but who listens to San Serac? his stage presence isn't a tenth of this dude's. Alyson Moyet is who he kind of reminds me of - nowhere near the range, but the same way of situating his style in a musical context where it's not the first approach one naturally expects.

nb I will probably never hear another note of their music I don't give a shit, but for people who are ostensibly into music as performed art to hand-wave this the way you're doing is like...do you actually think or give a shit about performance? this is like so obviously a good one that like idk man whatever

this conversation has become v. uninteresting so let's change the subject: I recently reread Roland Barthes' essay "The Bourgeois Art of Song", in which he takes Gérard Souzay to task for his overly-expressive renderings of Fauré (sickest burn = "Souzay's phrasings are constantly destroyed by the excessive expression of a word"), which Barthes attempts to generalize into a theory of 'bourgeois art': "essentially descriptive, it constantly imposes not emotion but the signs of emotion"... it occurs to me that this criticism could very easily apply to Sam Herring ("signs of emotion" = beating his chest so hard the microphone picks it up), but it's precisely the reason I love him. does this make me hopelessly bourgeois??

sorry aero, "this conversation has become v. uninteresting" preceded yr last post, u know i love u dude

lol I think if I post 200+ words it is generally fair to conclude that the conversation has become uninteresting

the weird death growls thrown in van morrison-style like they come from some personal vocabulary of what counts as emphasis

most excellent

*You* say uninteresting *I* say bourgeois. "Words".

well the reason I cite the Barthes essay is that he touches on something I imagine is not far from da croupier's criticisms (overly "expressive" singing could very well read as "amateurish"), but he grounds his critique in concrete details, i.e. 'is it really necessary to emphasize the double-F in affreuse?'

"it is a somewhat nauseating happiness, this bonheur signified by an initial emphasis, expelling happiness from the mouth like a plum pit" <<< gets me every time

is it necessary for van morrison to sing "you" so many times in "Cul De Sac"?

this guy looks like he works out a LOT

sorry for flippantly dismissing a performance from a band you don't care about and will never hear again, aero

it doesn't really sound like you are

Well I'm sorry it bothers him. I thought "paul young karaoke" was a humorous description myself but its true I may undervalue combining death growl with van Morrison.

Death growl with Paul young, rather

i get mad van morrison in the last waltz vibes from this guy it's true

people generally don't know anything at all about singing tho and by good singing often mean "did it sound like somebody doing the national anthem at a ballpark"

Hope we get to him do this in the 2014-15 season.

the rule is props where due croup - you're putting whether you like what they do ahead of your ability to critique whether they're doing what they do well. I don't really watch track and field but if I see a guy and I don't like his clothes so I say "that guy's really slow" then I'm fronting

http://i.imgur.com/gFpsAHG.gif

I honestly don't think calling this guy's hammy, goofy or unpolished is quite comparable. And I already rescinded the vile "amateurish"

Guy's performance, rather

@ bernard, Souzay is finding some tendentious and convoluted ways of saying "he over-emoted". Furthermore the idea that one performance is "emotion" and another performance is "a description of emotion" is missing the whole point of the word "performance"

aero I hope you investigate these guys on record I genuinely think you are being dismissive, indie sure but they're great

pour a glass of cherry wine and put On the Water on imo

yeah I was saying this before this thread got flooded with whatever the hell you guys are arguing about but On the Water was my favorite album of 2011, it's really really good

aero I hope you investigate these guys on record I genuinely think you are being dismissive, indie sure but they're great

they're from around here originally, I think I saw 'em back when - l. got some shots of them at a tiny club up the street. I listen to metal 3/4 of the time and classical the other 1/4 that is just reality around here these days

xp to goon tie: strongly disagree—I am much more interested in a critic who writes "he emphasizes individual words, or parts of words, in a way that detracts from the melody and merely reiterates the sentiments already present in the lyrics" than one who settles for "he over-emotes"