As often as I go to Amoeba, I never see the same people, of course since it’s never the same band who is playing! But every time, there is someone to brief me about a band I rarely know anything about. This time a guy told me a little bit about Islands: I thought they were kind of new to the scene and I couldn’t have been more wrong, ‘Oh no, I have been listening to them for 9 years!’ he told me… 9 years? I was very off on that one. ‘They are getting more popular’ he added when I shamefully admitted never have heard of them before. ‘Ski Mask’ is actually Islands’ fifth album and frontman Canada-born Nick Thorburn has quite a pedigree as he was also in the Unicorns (among several other bands) and is a third of the indie super group, Mister Heavenly.
The four members of Islands were performing at Amoeba on Tuesday night for the release of their new album – which can be entirely streamed on Pitchfork by the way, so they are totally hip! – and it was impossible to not notice the sweet melodies and the overwhelming pop sensibility of the songs, wow… there were hooks all over the place, blossoming several times at each song. I instantaneously liked what I was hearing, Nick Thorburn’s vocals sounded too emotional and melancholic to exercise any resistance, and their dreamy 4-part harmonies made me think about a lot of types of music I had heard before and liked. But that was the weird part, right there, almost each song was bringing something different, and Islands’ music was hard to figure out, as Thorburn described it in an interview:
‘This record is kind of a culmination of all the different things we’ve done over the years. It’s basically a melting pot of all those sounds. So much of this record is about identity – specifically, the quest for finding out your own identity. Islands has always been kind of about that. In a lot of ways, we’ve always been kind of this homeless entity. We didn’t really fit in specifically with any genre and we were really never part of any community. Islands has always been it’s own thing… and I think the frustration of feeling like this very isolated band with no place to properly fit in made everything come to a head on this record. All of these feelings and ideas that have been bubbling up over the course of four previous albums finally came to the surface on this one. This record is like a summation of Islands, everything we’ve ever done distilled into one record. It’s basically an essential introduction to Islands – it’s everything we’ve ever been about.’
I suppose that, in this harsh case of isolation, a better moniker they could haven’t found, but they were a lot of things: sweet hooks, strangely changing rhythms, nostalgia, drama and triumph combined in one song (such as ‘Of Corpse’ or ‘We’ll Do It So You Don’t Have To’ with its Elliott Smith-esque accents), and yes, I had noticed this bubbling of ideas going on even in the same song, whereas Thorburn’s voice was always center-stage. The tropical ‘Wave Forms’ was part Grandaddy (the vocals) part Paul Simon (the guitars), while the falsetto and the harmonies of ‘Death Drive’ could have been Shins-like (why not?). ‘Becoming the Gunship’ was all triumphant-soaring choruses, and other songs were reconciling intimacy and indie grandiosity (‘Hushed Tones’). ‘Here Here’ was pure uplifting sweetness that could have melt the hardest hearts. Remarkably, I had never listened to any of these songs but I was able to recognize them right away, when streaming the album online, which says a lot about my immediate emotional connection with them…. Plus I suspect the lyrics were ironic and dark in a humorous kind of way? In this case I will have to revisit and pay closer attention. In any case, Nick Thorburn was very funny when he announced that his record was out today, encouraging Amoeba shoppers to buy it: ‘We will get dropped by our label if we don’t sell enough records the first week,… and since it’s my label, you don’t want to have this conversation,… So I’m not… kidding!’
And if it wasn’t enough diversity, they call rapper Subtitle on stage for some help on their last song,… what? A rap song ? That was the last thing I was expecting after such poppy harmonies, but as I said, it seemed they were playing several songs in one sometimes, so why not venturing into rap?
