Foreign Islands 'Restart Now!' album

Mark Ryan, lead singer, urban legend and well-known NYC nightlife personality, originally formed the band with friend and producer Dean Baltulonis. After recruiting the rest of their line-up, the band recorded and self-released their eponymous debut EP in August 2005. The band is quickly earning a reputation as one of New York's best live acts, serving up tight, energetic sets with added percussion, buzzes and electronic beeps. Mark Ryan's punk delivery and sassy lyrics compliment a call-and-response guitar exchange between Dean and James Gelini. Drummer Andy Action provides a sturdy backbone for the group to deliver the spazz, and Johnny McAuliffe's bass lines will stick in your head.

Since their recent inception, Foreign Islands has played with acts such as The Hold Steady, Les Savy Fav, White Rose Movement, The Detachment Kit, The Like, Lady Sovereign and more. Nude Records (UK) released the Foreign Islands' first single, Fine Dining (With the Future) in July of 2006, specifically targeting DJs and specialty markets in the underground London club scene.

Biography

“I get so crazy onstage sometimes that it’s hard for me to put together a sentence.”

That’s Brooklyn dance-punk quintet Foreign Islands’ microphone-hurling, frenzy-starting, sorta homeless, definitely superstitious frontman Mark Ryan’s reason for keeping his band’s scorching dance-a-thon shows efficient and chatter-free. “We just fucking drop the bomb.”

In some ways, Foreign Islands seems like a spazz-rock explosion that dropped from the sky. After kicking around New York’s hardcore scene for years, Ryan, a charmingly scruffy nightlife personality and DJ who was once asked to star in a porn film, hooked up with guitarist Dean Baltulonis, a studio engineer who’s logged time in NYC and Boston. The two friends started a band called Steady Roosevelt, which gave way to Get On Get On. After dissolving that outfit, they recruited drummer/eBay salesman Andy Action and bassist/construction worker Johnny McAuliffe (both of whom Baltulonis had recorded) and guitarist James Gelini, who worked with Ryan at venerable Manhattan rock club Irving Plaza.

Foreign Islands’ first show came in July 2005, after they’d been playing together only a month, and the band recorded and self-released its eponymous debut EP in August. A buzzed-about performance with Lady Sovereign at Austin’s South by Southwest Music Festival followed the next March, and they’ve spent the rest of this year knocking audiences in the head (literally) at the kind of jaw-dropping live gigs people just keep talking about with their inimitable, sassy mix of punk, disco, new wave, post-punk, and trance that at times recalls !!!, the Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, and Bloc Party.

TK NAME OF LP, which fulfills Ryan’s no-filler mandate with six instantly appealing club-ready new songs and two remixes, was recorded in bits and pieces over the past few months, mostly in the middle of the night when Baltulonis could snag free hours at the studio. Twitchy, glitchy first single “We Know You Know It” — which boasts a razor-riff chorus topped by a blend of harmonies — is about “some hardcore-type dudes just overstaying their welcome,” according to Ryan, who heaps praise on a rather eclectic list of artists (Jeff Buckley, Radiohead, Rufus Wainwright, the Germs, the Specials) within a 10-minute block of time. On other swaggering tracks marked by Ryan's punky speak-sung vocals, jumpy basslines, and stabs of guitar, Ryan says he’s “talking mad shit about people that we know that fucked us over.” One of his band goals is “trying to kill that old music thing where like, dudes think they’re fucking way more awesome than they really are. We’re trying to kill like, shitty emo dude mythology.” Needless to say, this is not a band lacking a point of view.

They’ve received the dubious compliment “all five of you guys are insane in five different ways!” They’ve made fans of bouncers they’ve almost taken out with mic stands (one responded with: “Dude, if you were any other dude, I would have knocked you out — you guys are fucking amazing!”), a blogger who actually survived a wicked shot to the head, DJ Junior Sanchez, the Hold Steady, legendary hip-hop producer Arthur Baker (Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock”), German DJ Boys Noize, London rock-remix specialist Erol Alkan, people who love to dance, people who love punk rock, people who love watching a bunch of guys tear a club to shreds.

And a lot of praise has come from unlikely sources: “We get a lot of reviews from people who accidentally see us,” Ryan explains. “Like, ‘I was just expecting another band and I got blown away.’”

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Foreign Islands - Restart Now!