I was surprised to see that Islands had a new album out, seeing as how it's only been a year and change since Arm's Way. Well, one of the original members has re-joined the band, so perhaps this--or the lukewarm reception of the aforementioned album--spurred such a quick turnaround. Whatever the case, here we are with Vapours, an album that is half "step in the right direction" and half "still not quite up to par."
The most noticeable difference about this album is the stripped down production and song lengths. Arm's Way was a bloated-but-interesting attempt at something different, failing more than it succeeded thanks to overstuffed sounds and less emphasis on songwriting and hooks. Vapours ostensibly reverses these qualities: no songs are longer than five minutes and the focus of the album is on stripped down, infectious keyboard heavy synth-pop/new wave. I say "ostensibly" because, as with Arm's Way, I find most of the songs forgettable and pleasant to a boring degree; not "infectious" at all. The Unicorns album and Islands's first, Return To The Sea, were bristling with unique ideas and hooks. If not always peppy and quirky, their songs were at least memorable. There's a sluggish flow and pacing to Vapours that undermines its synth-pop leanings, while the songwriting is, again, not up to par.
There's just something off about most of the tracks on Vapours, as if they start out well or have all the ingredients of great music, but they never quite come together. The ethereal, falsetto vocals of 'On Foreigner' are nice, but they aren't the focus of the track; what should be a razor sharp hook is instead diluted in a sea of plodding, overly verbose pop that comes off as deflated and boring. 'Tender Torture' starts out interestingly enough, with tough guitar chording and cheesy keyboards, but then it just keeps doing the same thing for three more minutes, leaving you waiting for some hook or pay off that never comes.
However, I do think Vapours is a better album than Arm's Way, and this is largely due to its strong finish. 'Heart Beat' delivers on the promise of Islands tackling synth-pop, with a vocoder'd vocal, almost reggae-esque loping guitar line, and insistent melodies. 'The Drums' doesn't have a true hook or chorus, but builds to a satisfying crescendo of sound that gives way to, what else, a drum heavy outro. Then there's the excellent 'EOL', which features the sharp lyric "a building fell on me" that, combined with the music, sounds like a mature ancestor to the younger, more whimsical death/injury obsessed Unicorns album. Vapours ends with 'Everything Is Under Control', all intense drums, echo-y guitars, spacey keyboards and dream-pop blissed out vocals. It actually is the sort of thing that Arm's Way tried to do and failed at, stuffing the production with sounds and atmospherics while placing less emphasis on songwriting. But here, it works, for whatever reason.
Rest assured, Vapours is a better overall album than Arm's Way, but it's still not quite up to the level of Return To The Sea. All personal misgivings about synth-pop aside, Vapours simply doesn't offer enough good, memorable songs to truly ensnare my heart. The last four songs, however, are pretty great, though this leaves me with an uneven impression every time I listen to it. If Arm's Way is a three stars out of five album that I wouldn't recommend, Vapours is at least worth a listen despite a similar score.
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.
If there's a trend I'm beginning to see in 2008 amongst the indie rock leading minds, it's that this is the year of indulgence and complexity. Perhaps I'm making a mountain of a mole hill, but with Stephen Malkmus's album being all jammy and guitar hero-y, the forthcoming Silver Jews album being all accessible and poppy, and future releases by Wolf Parade and Islands having both awesome cover art as well as complicated, long winded songs, it's starting to look like everyone is following whims and/or pushing themselves to expand their art.
I'm going back to Random Spirit Lover by Sunset Rubdown from this past fall, and I'm finding this similar change had already taken place within this band. The songs are longer (only two songs are less than four minutes), more complicated, and less distinct--often the songs flow into each other and have no obvious chorus/verse/chorus structures. This isn't so much prog rock as it is a true album album.
Music critics have used phrases like 'rewards repeated listening' and 'a true album rather than a collection of songs' for many years, and it's exactly for releases like Random Spirit Lover that they were forged. I've been listening to the album off and on since its release last October but it's only recently that I've completely come around to it. Up to this point, it most definitely was good but I didn't see the greatness yet. Compared to Spencer Krug's work with Wolf Parade, Swan Lake, or even the last Sunset Rubdown album, it felt like he was purposely sabotaging one of his best assets: his ability to write off-kilter but insanely catchy songs.
However, given enough time, Random Spirit Lover reveals itself to be every bit the equal of those projects. While they may possess better, self contained songs, Random Spirit Lover possesses better moments. None of the songs from the album immediately stand out, but moments certainly do. 'The Courtesan Has Sung' begins with an echoed, overlapping vocal line and primitive percussion, a seeming minimalist indulgence with no merit, before Krug starts to sing wordless "woah ah oh"s and the keyboards and guitars strike and the whole thing positively glows out of the speakers. Meanwhile, 'Colt Stands Up, Grows Horns'--which is the weakest 'song' on the album--serves to take the sting off the brilliant 'Winged/Wicked Things' with its spacey, frozen ambiance before a crazed funhouse keyboard outro leads us into the mid-tempo 'Stallion' which begins the second half of the album. I don't know if it's actually true, but from the time that keyboard outro begins and Krug comes in on 'Stallion', it feels like the longest stretch of time on the album without vocals. This gives the whole three song package a tinge of entering the second half of a story, as if an all instrumental intermission has occurred before the curtain rises on the next act.
The problem with an album like this is that if you're the sort of listener who just wants to get to the catchy pop moments, you're going to hate this album. It's difficult in the sense that it only rewards people who will stick with it and enjoy not just the main course of a meal but the aperitifs, appetizers, desserts, and digestifs as well. You could skip around to the moments or songs you like best, but it doesn't have the same effect it does when you listen to the whole thing and come to these heights naturally. With Random Spirit Lover the old adage holds true: it's about the journey, not the destination. The first time I listened to the whole thing in its entirety, it was during a power outage. Forced to kill time with just my iPod, I gave it my full attention in one chunk rather than the piecemeal listens I had given it in the past. I loved the experience, but afterward I couldn't remember which specific songs I liked.
This will be why people who just want quick-and-dirty three minute pop songs won't like it, and why people who want something more will love it. You really need to set aside an hour and give yourself over to it completely. Just as you would devote more time and attention to a complicated film, novel, or videogame, Random Spirit Lover asks more of the listener but it also provides richer rewards. You may not listen to it every day, but when you're in the mood for a full meal and not just the main course, you'll find a lot to digest here.
This may seem needlessly myopic, but for me, the musical heart of this decade didn't make itself clear until 2003 and 2004. While Radiohead's Kid A released in late 2000 signaled that artists could take major risks without losing their audience or the love of critics, it didn't end up being quite the revolution that, say, Nirvana's Nevermind was for the 90s. Rather, consider 2003 and 2004 as the time when indie rock made itself known as a force to be reckoned with. These two years saw definitive, decade defining releases from big names like Arcade Fire (Funeral), Broken Social Scene (You Forgot It In People), Deerhoof (Milk Man), Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Fever To Tell), The Postal Service (Give Up), Death Cab For Cutie (Transatlanticism), Fiery Furnaces (Blueberry Boat), The New Pornographers (The Electric Version), Sufjan Stevens (Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State), TV On The Radio (Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes or the Young Liars EP), and, of course, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? by the Unicorns. A truly heady mix of bands, and I'm probably leaving a lot out.
The Unicorns have come to stand, at least in my mind, for the kind of overnight success and collapse of a band that can happen in the current music journalism world. The Unicorns came out of nowhere in 2003 with this, their only album, and it seemed that every publication--both online and off--was lavishing praise upon them. After touring for more than a year, the band, exhausted and (presumably) a bit sick of each other, posted on their website that the band was through, confirming this in early 2005. Since then, two members collaborated on an album under the name Islands though shortly after the release of their debut Return To The Sea one member had departed. Thankfully, other massively popular, out-of-left-field bands like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have weathered the initial storm better.
While the albums I mentioned above all, somehow, fit under the broad indie rock umbrella, I think that this album helped to define the specific indie rock template for this decade. First of all, it's from a Canadian band, and one of the big stories of the '00s has been the emergence and viability of Canadian bands. Secondly, the album makes use of perky, tight drumming, crunchy-or-very-clean guitars, spazzy retro keyboards, 60s style supporting bass that is mixed fairly low in the mix, and more immediate, affected vocals. I associate all of these elements, to various extents, with the current "indie rock standard" sound. I'm not saying that the Unicorns pioneered this sound, or that every band in indie rock today is influenced by them, but I notice a lot of these common elements, and this album came out early enough to cement it in my mind. Lastly, the album is a damn good slice of what, at barebones, could be called pop/rock, but yet sounds nothing like what we typically think of when we say pop/rock.
Other than the fact that Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? still stands up as a damn good indie pop/rock album, there's two more things that made it so irresistable to critics and fans. The songs are untraditional in the sense that they rarely conform to basic structures like chorus/verse/chorus. Quite often, they're linear, or quickly jump between sections like the Fiery Furnaces or, sometimes, Deerhoof. Take 'Sea Ghost', which starts with a pennywhistle, adds bouncy drums, crunchy guitars, and precocious, affected vocals as it goes. Over its 3:43 duration, it never once repeats anything. Then there's the studio bantery opening of 'Tuff Luff', giving way to a barely there dirge before violins and fluffy keyboards bring the song to the surface for fresh air. Things fall back to just a molasses slow bass line and sweet harmonies before, again, a full band sound comes in--then there's a quick drum break with a short rap--and the song draws to a close with a repeated refrain of "save us" with odd sound effects and resounding drums.
The other thing I think that people latch unto with this album is its self awareness and referentiality. The album opens with 'I Don't Wanna Die' and closes with 'Ready To Die.' In between, there's three songs in a row with the word "ghost" in the title, a few songs directly about the band ('Let's Get Known', 'I Was Born (A Unicorn)'), and, just maybe, a reference to future band Islands in 'Ready To Die.' Which is pretty meta, I suppose: it's a song about being ready to die, but it could also be about the death of the band and hints at the Islands project. But that's reaching a bit. The only other (non-live) album I can think of that's as aware of both itself as an album and the songs themselves is Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, which either gives that album another feather in its cap for being ahead of its time or just means that I'm the only one who pays attention to these sort of things.
I'm a little worried that as time goes on, this album will be forgotten or at least not given the attention it deserves. Typically when bands implode after one album, even if the members go on to record great things under other names, that first album is forgotten. While I like Return To The Sea a lot, and it could have easily come out as the second Unicorns album, there is just something joyous and fresh about Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? that was lost in the transition toward a more nuanced, mature sound. But that's a review for another day. For now, track down a copy of this album and enjoy.
I was surprised to see that Islands had a new album out, seeing as how it's only been a year and change since Arm's Way. Well, one of the original members has re-joined the band, so perhaps this--or the lukewarm reception of the aforementioned album--spurred such a quick turnaround. Whatever the case, here we are with Vapours, an album that is half "step in the right direction" and half "still not quite up to par."
