Islands’ lofty aspirations unfulfilled
Arm’s Way
Islands
ANTI-
(2008)
Beach Boy Carl Wilson was famously reported to have said of the band’s Smiley Smile released in 1967, a haphazardly compiled substitution for the much-fabled SMiLE — which would become, until its resurrection in 2004, the most famous unreleased album in pop history — that it was “a bunt instead of a grand slam.” Wilson’s observation reflects an incontrovertible truth about Smiley Smile: it’s under produced, incoherent, and silly. And contrasted with its infamous sibling, it ultimately feels rather inconsequential. This oft-repeated quote, indeed, has often been taken as a wholesale dismissal of the record. But a bunt, properly placed, can still score a run; small balls, in other words, still wins games — even if it does so in an unremarkable manner. Smiley Smile, all things considered, is a pretty wonderful album, even if it hasn’t gone down in history as such.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s an album that raises a difficult question. Is it better to throw down the bunt or to go down on strikes, swinging for the fences? Or, for the sports metaphor-challenged: is it better to aim low and succeed wildly, or to go all out, and fail in a blaze of glory? The legendary narrative of the Beach Boys’ SMiLE certainly says that the latter route is preferable. So too does Arm’s Way, the latest album from Montreal-based indie rock band Islands. Arm’s Way is an album that strikes out, but does so with enough plucky ambition as to still be pretty commendable anyway.
Islands, of course, are (much to the chagrin of band leader Nicholas Thorburn) probably best-known as an offshoot of The Unicorns — a trio who themselves were best known for just being weird. Not “yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye” weird, either, but as truly strange as music can get while still operating within the aesthetic confines of popular music. The Unicorns — between their referential pseudonyms, spastic song construction, and undeniable obscurity — were post-modern pop stars, hell-bent on crafting beautiful pop songs in the most difficult manner imaginable; deliberately accenting surprisingly lush melodies with thick swells of feedback, looping, and lo-fi keyboard licks. And they paired it with a deliberately obtuse lyrical sensibility that fixated on the morbid, the morose, and the often indecipherable. Even their 2004 break-up — two members (Thorburn and Jamie Thompson) going on to form both Islands and an unrelated hip-hop project (Th’ Corn Gangg) — seemed like part of an elaborate put-on.
Islands’ debut, Return to the Sea (2006), only fuelled those suspicions, scraping by as it did on the strength of a Unicorns leftover (“Rough Gem”) and a broadly similar aesthetic ideal, a tongue-in-cheek marriage of chaos and beauty, with a heavy dose of lyrical playfulness. But Return to the Sea polished the edges, and integrated subtle shades of calypso, country, and hip-hop. More importantly, Return to the Sea was a more organic piece of music, a joyous celebration of song cycles, suites, and pocket symphonies. It was still weird, and it wasn’t always successful, but it embodied the band’s deeper aspirations. Thompson departed in 2006, leaving Islands under the sole leadership of Thorburn. And so the question changed: it was no longer a matter of whether Islands would outlive their equine past, but how Thorburn would proceed in the absence of a longtime collaborator. Arm’s Way suggests that it’s a stupid question, continuing as it does, in relentless pursuit of a contemporary — albeit considerably subverted — equivalent to the lush, harmonic, and profoundly affecting pop that the Beach Boys rode to popular and critical acclaim some forty years ago.
Which is why Smiley Smile comes immediately to mind as the twelve songs on Arm’s Way unfurl. Because Arm’s Way sounds, when all is said and done, like Nicholas Thorburn’s attempt at crafting his own SMiLE. But given that it took Brian Wilson — the real Brian Wilson — two tries and forty years to make SMiLE, it goes without saying that Thorburn’s opus still has yet to be written.
Amongst other issues, Thorburn doesn’t have the vocal prowess — indeed, his nasal falsetto is a stark counterpoint to Arm’s Way’s immaculate arrangements. But he and his band certainly have the compositional chops to craft something special. Arm’s Way comes from the same intellectual and emotional drive that compelled Brian Wilson to spend $50,000 recording “Good Vibrations” over seventeen sessions and six months in 1966: the compulsion to do whatever it takes to achieve a vision of perfection — splicing disparate song fragments, incorporating string, horn, and woodwind arrangements, tossing on multiple overdubs, obscure instrumental flourishes, and programmed drum loops.
And make no mistake: Arm’s Way is front-loaded with incredible songs. Album opener “The Arm,” for example, explodes into a rock-solid groove that’s accentuated by searing string fills, set to a pastiche of gaudy horror film imagery. So too is the garishly infectious “Creeper,” a percussive, synth-heavy composition which pairs a deliberate pop hook with a terrifying predilection for the details of violent crime.
That tendency isn’t isolated to a few shocking moments, either. Arm’s Way slinks by in the shadows, existing in the dark recesses of a world where the macabre takes center stage — a world where a partial re-write of The Who’s “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” about amputation, wouldn’t seem out of place. Slyly inserted, as it is, into the closing minutes of the shapeshifting “In The Rushes,” it doesn’t. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Arm’s Way’s other musical tangents, which become increasingly fragmented, chaotic, and confusing (the otherwise tense “Life In Jail,” for example, breaks momentarily, in order to bring us a cheery rock and roll hoedown).
There are few artists capable of singing a couplet like “You said you had my back / But I was attacked by a pack of dogs frothing at the mouth,” without betraying even a hint of metaphorical intent. Yet Thorburn rattles these lines off in “J’aime Vous Voir Quitter” with alarming regularity — and that’s both one of his greatest strengths and weaknesses: it’s quirky, and it’s appropriately tongue-in-cheek, but it’s inevitably hollow. “Kids don’t know shit / Everything they’ve learned is wrong,” from the track “Kids Don’t Know Shit” isn’t, fundamentally, a huge leap from the subtext of, say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older / Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long.”
Taken so literally, though, what’s the point? If it weren’t for the mostly stunning musical accompaniment, and the dazzling production, I would argue that there is none. And even though those redeeming features ultimately begin to fall apart, however, Arm’s Way retains enough momentum to scrape by. Barely, too — 11-minute closer “Vertigo (If It’s A Crime)” is a poorly paced, epic mess — but in a way that’s still kind of charming.
Arm’s Way is no SMiLE. It isn’t even a Smiley Smile, really. It’s over-long, unfocussed, and lyrically difficult. That said, Arm’s Way is also so ambitious that it’s certainly never anything less than interesting, an appeal crystallized in the momentary bursts of brilliance that make sifting through it a worthwhile pursuit: infectious hooks, dense melodies, and lush arrangements that — if only in spurts of a few seconds, or a few moments at most — suggest something profoundly magnificent in the creative process of Thorburn and his compatriots. Arm’s Way, really, is oblivious of its own limitations. But that obliviousness — manifesting itself, as it does, in a pervasive kind of wide-eyed musical naiveté — makes even its most glaring shortcomings seem profoundly magical.
Sooner or later, everyone fails at something. Arm’s Way, if nothing else, is proof that there’s a way to fail with such style and such grace that success seems kind of beside the point anyway.
