Islands- Arm's Way

It's tough to grow up. But it's even tougher to grow up when all you're known for is being a kid. Just ask any of the many child stars over the years who have tried to parlay their pre-teen successes into adulthood. What, then, to expect from a band like Islands, and leader Nicholas Thorburn, who has made a living out of crafting childish and catchy indie pop?? What to make of Arm's Way, an album that seems to perversely force itself into maturity and forget the band's appeal in the first place??

Well, that's not entirely fair. Thorburn's aesthetic, going back to the Unicorns album from half a decade ago, was to combine a whimsical, childish indie pop aesthetic with dark subject matter (many of his songs deal with death) and an experimental, genre bending playfulness that touches on prog rock, hip hop, and tropical flavors. And it's also true that the Unicorns album and the Islands' first album, Return To The Sea, had long songs. But, this album isn't as good as either of those, and gives one the impression that Thorburn took the worst tendencies of those albums to hear this time out, while simultaneously trying to forcefully mature the band's sound. Which is to say, he made the arrangements more complicated and focused more on nuance and overall sound than crafting 'hooks.' The result is an interesting, frustrating, and ultimately unfulfilling album that gives you just enough succor to want to come back but never enough to fill you up.

"Fill you up" is a bad way of putting it, because the one thing you're going to hear from most people about this album is how bloated it is. At 68 minutes it is inexcusably long, and for a band that formerly seemed to have no shortage of ideas (Return To The Sea is incredibly varied and consistently good at the same time), it's kind of sad that the album only has enough good material to support half that runtime. 'In The Rushes' is, frankly, a mess, a song that plods along for five minutes in search of a direction before suddenly quoting The Who's 'A Quick One While He's Away.' Unfortunately, this kind of "too clever for its own good" thing might have worked on a shorter, more quixotic Unicorns track, where you expect that kind of self conscious "oh, we're so quirky!!" vibe and can forgive it, but here it just seems like the band reaching to mirror their own attempts at length and bombast to that masterpiece and coming up very short. I will admit that I love the out-of-nowhere samba/Latin ending to 'J'aime Vous Voir Quitter', but this song is only three minutes long. Moreover, album closer 'Vertigo (If It's A Crime)' is 11 minutes long and mostly instrumental, and it's probably the most successful new idea on the album--it goes through many phases and ideas, but none of them are arbitrary or worthless fluff. So, my point is this: either give us these sharp changes in shorter songs, or go the Fiery Furnaces route and make the longer songs winding funhouses of sound, texture, and feel.

I've been listening to the new Wolf Parade album, At Mount Zoomer, at the same time I've been digesting Arm's Way and my overwhelming impression is that Thorburn desperately needs a creative foil. While the main Wolf Parade guys (Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug) can function very well outside of the band, they often have collaborators in those projects, too. Unfortunately, Thorburn seems adrift on his own course after the Unicorns broke up and Jamie Thompson left Islands. While he's capable of producing some brilliant and beautiful moments--of which 'To a Bond', 'The Arm', and most-likely-choice-for-single 'Creeper' are a testament--those moments are surrounded by lots of extraneous music that should have been left on the cutting room floor. This may sound hypocritical after I praised Sunset Rubdown's Random Spirit Lover for doing a similar thing, but the music between those brilliant, memorable moments on that album is very enjoyable if you listen to the album as a whole. With Arm's Way I just want to skip to the good parts and scrap the rest.

My hope is that Arm's Way is a difficult, growing pains album, not unlike the second Liars release. Now that Thorburn has moved his aesthetic past the quirky, quixotic, and compact indie pop/prog rock/cute-songs-with-dark-content phase of his career, let's assume he can either learn a new way of bringing his epic ideas to a more successful fruition, or perhaps re-learn some of what made his previous releases so great in the first place while better expanding their palette and delivery.