In Nick Thorburn’s first band, the Unicorns, his songwriting
was pulled by twin obsessions: the dream of pop-star immortality and
the promise of real, personal death (with a little room for comedy and
romance in between). Thorburn’s effective debut—following a
scarcely circulated, self-released, 500-copy album called Unicorns
Are People Too—was the Unicorns’ Who Will Cut Our Hair
When We’re Gone?. On that album, tracks like “Ready to Die,” “I
Don’t Wanna Die,” and various numbers about ghosts explored anxieties
about death (and possible, but not likely, afterlives) with cartoonish
color, while songs like “Child Star” and “Let’s Get Known” took an
equally skewed, silly look inward at the business of being in a
band.
Following the Unicorns’ heavily self-foreshadowed dissolution,
Thorburn went on to form Islands with Unicorns drummer Jamie Thompson,
who has since left the band. Their debut, Return to the Sea,
picked up literally where the Unicorns left off: On album opener “Swans
(Life after Death),” Thorburn sings, “I woke up thirsty on the day I
died,” echoing and fulfilling the “Ready to Die” line, “I woke up
thirsty on an island in the sea.” The album went on to replace the
Unicorns’ marshmallow ghosts and jelly-boned skeletons with
less-caricatured personal reflections and broader apocalyptic
visions—human societies hunkering down like rats underground,
volcanoes erupting into sudden global climate catastrophes.
Arm’s Way is Islands’ first album as a real, tour-hardened
band rather than a loosely organized studio project, and the solidified
sextet sounds more comfortable and confident than ever. The album has a
musical cohesion reminiscent of their clearly well-rehearsed, but still
breezy live show.
“This record was made by six people,” says Thorburn. “As opposed to
Return to the Sea, where we had myself and Jamie making a record
more as a project than as a band, bringing in friends to lay down
impromptu arrangements.”
Lyrically, though, Arm’s Way takes a sharp turn, leaving
behind the promises of pop and the shadow of death (though returning to
the scene of a car crash) to explore a fascination with crime and
punishment. “Creeper” tells the story of a violent home invasion. The
opening track, “The Arm,” casts the titular appendage as the punitive
reach of the law or fate/death itself. “Life in Jail” asks sincerely,
“You sure you want to spend your life in jail?,” positing imprisonment,
or loss of freedom, as a clear, conscious choice, though not
necessarily referring to a literal jail (elsewhere, references to busy
bees seem to suggest workaday industrial society as its own kind of
prison). “I Feel Evil Creeping In” finds Thorburn admitting, “It was me
that committed the felony.” “Vertigo (If it’s a Crime)” has him hanging
for his misdeeds and bemoaning his fate.
On the phone, Thorburn asks if I hate the record. I don’t, but it is
growing on me more gradually than the last record (Thorburn jokes that
his plan is, in fact, for each record to take longer and longer to
catch on). Arm’s Way isn’t Islands’ sophomore slump exactly, but
it is the sound of the band settling—not as in compromising, but
as a house into its foundations. Their confidence and comfort borders
on overconfidence. The more common rock arrangements feel too easy. One
worries that in bringing the whole band together, something of
Thorburn’s appealingly weirdo sensibility is being lost.