Review: Islands – Vapours (2009)
Back in 2006, a good friend brain-ninja’d me into picking up Islands’ debut album, Return to the Sea. Having never listened to The Unicorns, the one-and-out indie darlings from which Islands sprung, my initial reaction was…well, nonplussed. Who were these wackos, I wondered, and what in the hell were they doing to Music? The album was a hot mess, sprawling and unpolished, packed floor-to-rafters with bizarre lyrics, half-formed melodies, off-key harmonies and at least one completely uncalled-for 90s rap breakdown. It was peaceful, noisy, pleasant, grating, catchy, tattered, strident, beautiful, and confusing. I had a little trouble with it.
Of course, the more I made myself listen to it, the less I wished it were a copy of Welcome Interstate Managers. The melodies began to burrow, the lyrics unfurled, and, eventually, the band’s very mercuriality struck me as something admirable, something to enjoy rather than carefully glare at from a distance. I realized that all the album’s little quirks and misalignments were not representative of laziness, but of a certain, almost irreverent sense of spontaneity. These guys were not just playing music, they were actually playing music. This whole scene was just a strange game, of which they were playing their own variation and very clearly winning.
Return to the Sea was, and is, a really good album.
A bit later on, member Jamie Thompson (one of the two giant brains behind both bands, along with co-conspiritor Nick Thorburn) departed, leaving Nick T. to charge furiously into the sophomore slump with Arm’s Way, a great cud-lump of an album more or less smothered beneath a thick blanket of studio production. At this point, I was in love with the band, but the cruel, Episode I-level disappointment I felt at this gilded turd slid me into minor desolation.
So, imagine my surprise when, a couple of years older and marginally wiser, I stumbled upon news of a new Islands album, featuring the return of Jamie. After, or perhaps with, a small, giddy backflip, I pounced upon iTunes like a thousand kittens. Which brings us to the present.
Islands’ “Tender Torture,” from Vapours.
Vapours, the band’s third, shiniest album, is good. Whatever it is that Jamie does in the band, they need to ensure that they never misplace him again – perhaps consider attaching his feet to the floor of the touring van with epoxy. Nearly everything here works; the melodies are as good as ever, the curiously off-kilter harmonies have returned full-force, and there’s just a greater sense of control here than on Arm’s Way, which had all the restraint of a rampaging wildebeest.
Aurally, the first thing one notices is the thick veneer of electronica. While Return to the Sea, too, made use of synthesizers, it did so more in the way that Easter pageants make use of kindergartners dressed like Aladdin. Vapours, by contrast, is more polished. This not to suggest that the band’s myriad other genre touches are absent, merely that there’s a sense of unity to the whole thing – they’ve added yet one more weapon to their arsenal, and they wield it with the same oddball abandon as all the rest.
The lyrics, too, see a shift, bringing along a only bit of the black whimsy of the first album and leaving most of the unpleasantly macabre imagery of Arm’s Way far behind. If they only occasionally prove memorable (“it’s the bass line in your mind / it’s a sexy way to cry / you know I had my share of doubts / until I saw the vapours in your eyes.” – “Vapours”), it is perhaps a result of this gradual creep toward the light. Still, it’s mostly made up for by the sheer accessibility of the music, which, being somewhat less bedraggled than their debut, is much easier to take a shine to. “Switched On,” “Vapours,” “Tender Torture,” and “Heartbeat” are as catchy as anything the band as ever done, and it’s in those moments that one very nearly forgets the missteps entirely.
Sure, there’s nothing as epic as “Swans (Life After Death)” or “Volcanoes,” or as fun as “Rough Gem,” but Islands offers up a smorgasbord of four-minute pop here that, if lacking a bit in tonal warmth, nonetheless signals a happy return to form. Vapours is closer to Return to the Sea (and occasionally even The Unicorns’ Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?) than the charmless excess of its predecessor. It never particularly goes out of its way to impress or amaze, but proves a gratifying listen nonetheless, simply by virtue of being more of the good stuff that the band promised with their debut. Familiar but new, it neither treads water nor leaps ahead, but instead explores the boundaries of the band’s comfy, cozy musical sandbox. I think, for these guys, that’s preferable to a quantum leap and a faceplant. And it’s cool with me, too.
