"I woke up thristy / the day I died"
I'm a little behind, considering this album was released in 2006, but I only found out about Islands a few months ago. Besides, I'm restless, and the album is worth writing about--it's accessible, but troubling.
Perhaps it's my liberal arts background, or perhaps it's that I'm currently reading Rushdie's Satanic Verses, but its difficult to ignore the tones of reincarnation lingering throughout this album. Its title alone conjures common death/rebirth motifs: the ancient mariner, baptism, Odysseus--that irrevocable notion of returning to some salty silence, real or imagined, only to emerge once more; to return to return, etc. And when the parenthetical addition to the title track is "Life After Death," well, it becomes a little obvious there's more here than a few quirky tunes.
The songs also toy with the metaphor of joining, and on many tracks there is a logical collision in verse between I/you/we. Toward the end of the album, the song "Ones" begins with introspection: "in my mouth, my eyes, my ears, my nose." In most circumstances, one could dismiss this as little more than navel gazing. Yet the low timbre of the vocals and steady, repetitive tempo lulls us into a dreamy ease, making the shift to "our head, our legs, our toes, our eyes" barely discernible. And then "we" return to the sea: the first 5 minutes of the final track is water. Quiet, ubiquitous yet barely there.
More composed than their Unicorns albums, but still retaining that playfulness, Islands' Return to the Sea has a few tracks that stand out. Like "Don't Call Me Whitney, Bobby", "Rough Gem," and their elegy to Earth, "Volcanoes." Yet for all the pop-laden riffs, there is a latent darkness roaming about. I'm reminded of reading about Victorian England, how families would dress up the recently deceased for photographs (mostly babies and children who died prematurely, but sometimes whole families). Return to the Sea aims its lens at spousal and drug abuse, genocide in African diamond mines; the apocalypse: all dressed up to wholly resemble pop songs.
Should one read any further in to an indie record? Even here Islands is coy, inviting us using one hand to share the metaphor, but using the other to dismiss any greater interpretation with a wave: "dig deep, but don't dig too deep / when it's late you'll see the hole is empty."
Islands are currently touring, and about to release a new album, Arm's Way, in May. To all my friends down in Denton, check them out at Hailey's on 12 March. Trust me. Have I ever let you down?
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