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Islands - Vapours
| Dustedmagazine |
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Islands’ new album Vapours is a good example of what it means to incorporate as opposed to what we can call appropriate. At this point in the narrative, it seems useless to keep criticizing Western indie artists who borrow other cultures’ ideas from their elite perch. Cultural gentrification is no longer an outlier strategy, but rather is being employed by band after band and label after label. As an idea, it’s begun to achieve critical mass, and the flow of ideas from privileged to less-privileged and vice versa is starting to be reciprocal enough that maybe, in the end, it’s justified. Maybe U.S. exceptionalism in the political realm won’t weigh too heavily on the aesthetic realm. I suppose what’s left to sort out then is how creatively one ganks from someone else and how the power dynamic shakes out. If one just grabs a melody or drumbeat from some traditional Tanzanian music and overlays some lyrics about their parents’ ranchhouse, we can call that theft out for what it really is. There are, of course, more imaginative ways to incorporate. Islands are not thieves, which is what distinguishes them in large part from the mass of indie bands that gained their pedigree in the last decade. One can pick out the moments when they most sound like the Pixies, or like prog, or like ’60s pop, or like calypso, but in every case, those moments sink back into the whole. This seems to say that Jaime Thompson and Nick Thorburn aren’t stealing in any way, but are merely influenced, which is a specific distinction. When a musical idea is forced because the artist thinks something or someone is cool and wants to sound like them, that’s the clunky touch of an inexperienced burglar, leaving fingerprints and telltale signs everywhere. On the other hand, there are those that are genuinely touched by something, and rather than set out to sound a certain way naturally and organically become that way. Islands genuinely feels like the latter, because no moment on Vapours ever feels forced or incongruous....full text |
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| Spin |
| Call it Nick Diamonds Gets His Groove Back. Former Unicorn Nick Thorburn went a bit dark and dreary on 2008's Arm's Way, but with Vapours, the transplanted New Yorker relearns his playfulness: "Heartbeat" gleefully busts out Auto-Tune, so if you've ever wondered what Kanye imagines when he listens to Vampire Weekend, here you go. The title track tickles a cruise-ship vibe, then flat out asks you to love it: "Hope I entertain, hopin' you get dancin' feet." It's not all sunshine -- "Disarming the Car Bomb" needs more grit, and "Shining" sounds pulled from bleaker times -- but Vapours is a welcome righting of the ship....full text |
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| Allmusic |
| On their previous album, Arm's Way, Islands inflated the sweet and quirky sound of their first album, Return to the Sea, into an unwieldy mess of overly ambitious arrangements and overcooked songwriting. On 2009's Vapours, the band and songwriter/vocalist Nick Diamonds have scaled back the sound considerably and delivered an album of mostly straightforward indie rock with enough lyrical and sonic weirdness to keep things interesting. Plenty of vintage synths, cheesy drum machines, and off-kilter arrangements can be heard, as well as songs with the typically strange lyrical imagery Diamonds has dealt out since his days with the Unicorns. What makes Vapours a success, though, is that the majority of the songs have strong melodies and sharp hooks. The lighthearted, easygoing tracks like "Vapours," "Switched On," and "Disarming the Car Bomb" are the easiest to latch onto initially. Diamonds' wispy, intimate voice proves more than enough to handle the demands of being a pop/rocker, and the band has a light touch as it bounces along happily. As you listen to the record, though, it's the tracks with a little more emotional depth that really grab you. Whether it's the vocoder-led ballad "Heartbeat" or "On Foreigner" (which sounds like a Western take on 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" with its twangy guitars and huge vocal harmonies), the restraint of the arrangements and the hushed intimacy of Diamonds' singing allow the songs to sink in. In the past it would have been a stretch to call an Islands song emotionally honest or even affecting, but they pull it off repeatedly on the album. Showing more than a trace of the bombast of Arm's Way, a couple of songs like "Drums" and "Shining" collapse under their own weight and are the only things that keep Vapours from being Islands' best work. Still, this is a welcome return to form for the band....full text |
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