Though it’s a reasonable and oft-repeated truism that you shouldn’t hold against someone the indiscretions of youth, there are some acts of infamy that are simply too hard to outrun. For Islands’ Nick Thorburn, the once teenaged Nicholas Diamonds of Montreal art-pop pranksters The Unicorns, a few years of on-stage fistfights, matching pink costumes, and performance-art juvenilia cemented his status as an indie rock l’enfante terrible, an artist whose most penetrating gift was finding ingenious ways to make you feel foolish for taking him seriously. By the time The Unicorns disintegrated in 2005, with Thorburn and drummer Jamie Thompson forming Islands, he was asking you to do just that, to suspend disbelief and accept that he had finally grown up.
“I can’t even relate to that person,” Thorburn says, speaking softly and in measured tones. “I was such an adolescent. It was fun. It was a good thing to go through. But I can’t relate to that me at all, musically or otherwise. I feel like so many people still mention or reference The Unicorns when talking to me or about me. I don’t think that [Islands] has quite yet earned its own reputation. I think that’s what this record is going to do. It’s so drastically different from who I was in The Unicorns. I think this record will really be in our own place.”
Illustrating his point, Islands’ sophomore album, Arm’s Way, is a remarkably assured work of pop craftsmanship, honing the creaky sprawl of 2006’s Return to the Sea into glistening orchestral arrangements and proggy detours. Gone are the creaky textures and yelping vocals of their debut, here replaced with trilling strings, growling knots of guitars, and exacting choruses that wiggle away right before you start to sing along. There’s dance music, Bowie referencing space pop, and some theatrically surging hooks that could have fit on the The Who Sell Out. The shades of world music — Caribbean, Eastern European, African — remain, as does Thorburn’s taste for a visceral assortment of bursting veins and lifeless carcasses, but everything on Arm’s Way is bigger, bolder, and more exaggerated. Whereas Thorburn and Thompson used their first album to experiment with whatever they could find and whoever wanted to join them, this time every note would be locked down with exactitude. Anyone waiting for a punch line will be disappointed.
“When we made the first record, it was just Jamie and myself, and there was no band to speak of,” Thorburn explains. “It was more of a project, and we just had friends and musicians in Montreal come by and lay down guitar or keyboard or bass. We didn’t really have a band. And then after we made the record, we found these musicians and put the band together. Jamie left the band, but aside from that, everyone that reassembled immediately after making the record is still with us. It was a little premature, as far as a band goes, but I think that makes this record that much stronger and cohesive because of the band jelling.”
Of course, losing Thompson was no small event in the band’s history, as he was Thorburn’s collaborator and confidante, the only security blanket he had leftover from his days as a teenage pop terrorist. Though he’d move quickly to find a replacement drummer, the psychological hole Thompson’s departure left temporarily put the band’s future in jeopardy, leaving Thorburn to wonder if he was going to have to start yet another project for what was becoming his newest art-pop opus.
“I was pretty heartbroken and despondent,” Thorburn admits. “I felt pretty rejected. I got over it. It wasn’t about me. It was about Jamie’s decision to not be a part of that whirlwind machine anymore, where you’re constantly on the road and don’t have any foundation. That was becoming less and less appealing for him. We sorted through our differences, and we’re pretty close now. We’re working on a rap record now, and I respect his decision as much as I can. It was pretty shaky for a minute there, but I think that it was actually the best thing that could happen for me and this band. It was one of those things that make you stronger.”
Provided with another starting-over point, Thorburn and the rest of Islands wasted no time in following the detailed blueprint he had in his mind for Arm’s Way, going into the studio with a set of songs that had been perfected in their rehearsal space and tested on tour for a past year and a half. With producer Ryan Hadlock (Stephen Malkmus, Blonde Redhead) pushing him to be more deliberate with his vocals, Thorburn is a commanding presence, his confidence matched by the bombastic sprawl of the arrangements. With the exception of “Creeper,” a song that took shape in the studio, Islands’ follow-up album was more or less written just as their Return to the Sea was hitting “Best of 2006” lists. The man who had found fame shortly after figuring out a few guitar chords is now a serious auteur, creating a perfectly controlled album-length meditation on loss and longing where every song rises and falls with calculated precision to form a perfectly balanced whole. Indie rock’s clown prince has grown up.
“I’m not willy-nilly about making music, or even Willie Nelson about it,” he laughs. “I have an understanding of a concept or a conceptual whole, and I knew going into this record that there were certain lyrical themes that were repeated and lyrical moods that were constantly running through them. But I didn’t over-think it. It’s not like I sat down and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to write some songs for the new record!’ It just so happened that they were related, and maybe all the songs that I’ll ever write are going to be related to each other. I’m always writing, and it’s like a good puzzle where you have to find out how all the pieces fit. That was the idea for Arm’s Way, to make it work as a whole but not think about it too much. It’s just fortunate that it did work.”
But before he even went into the studio, Thorburn had to decide just what album he wanted to make, as his prolific writing pace had outstripped his ability to record everything in a timely manner. “We had a bunch of songs that we were playing out live for the past two years that ended up not being appropriate,” he says. “We had twelve other tracks, a whole other album of material, that didn’t fit. It wasn’t where we were going musically as a band. Some of the songs are really indicative of where we think we fit in. A song like ‘In the Rushes,’ that’s really where our heads are at these days, just moody and long instrumental parts that progress and parts that change and lyrics that are oblique but morbid. It’s one of my good qualities to know what works and what doesn’t without deliberating too much or hemming and hawing. I have too much time on my hands, I guess.”
That decisiveness has now blessed him with an excess of forty new songs through which he has to sort while the world is still catching up with his newest batch of twelve. And just as he turned toward excess and exploration with Arm’s Way, he promises that his current tastes are pulling him in yet another direction. “The songs I’ve got up my sleeve now are much shorter and much more straight-ahead, but I think that I’m just broadening my palette a bit. I think Islands is open to accepting all kinds of songs. I don’t want to be limited to doing pop psychedelia or proggy whatever. There are all sorts of possibilities. Everyone in the band has an influence on that too. Everyone has their own background and interests and musical tastes, and it all comes out.”
Whatever the case, Thorburn now presides over an expanding body of work that no one—least of all he—could have imagined only three years ago. As fascinating as The Unicorns were, it’s hard to sustain a career that’s based half on music and half on high jinx, making it far more likely we’d tire of his shenanigans than find him making albums as dazzling and vividly imagined as Arm’s Way. His creative restlessness, the one character trait that he shares with that impish teen, might just become his legacy.
“I find I have a thing where I reject work that I’ve done and put out, and quickly move on from that,” he explains. “That can be to my detriment or it can be a good thing, if it means that I’m trying to constantly grow and evolve as an artist. I think this album is way different than the last one, and it’s where I’m at as an artist and where the band is as well. I have no way to know what the objective impression of the record is,” he says, wavering for a moment. “The first album is really a dinky, wimpy, and poorly recorded album of jingly jangly throwaway tunes that I don’t really relate to anymore,” he says flatly. “Which is weird, because when making that record, I remember distinctly rejecting the idea of making a rock record. I had no desire to make music that was loud and annoying and arrogant and macho, but…eh…things change. I’m sure I’ll keep fluctuating.”