Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Michael Hsiung
Bones, bones, brittle little bones: it’s not the milk you seek — it’s the sun you need. Over and over and over those words will turn until your noggin’ feels like a cement mixer and your sanity spills out your ears like excess rocks and water, never to make a road or stadium seating. When the world goes completely crazy — we’re getting there aren’t we — Montreal-based band Islands will be there to nurse us back to health, mostly because it takes one to know one. The kinds of genius that we applaud, we oftentimes scorn for being too quirky for their own good, but Nick Diamonds and his hodge-podge of like-minded popsmiths coddle their active intrigues into intoxicating songs that never feel flowery or two much. They aren’t cute or silly, but invested in finding the hidden tangents that pull the song together in sometimes quizzical ways. To think that pop can ever teach us anything new or reveal itself as anything more than a worn out form of communication is a fair thing to think, but then you’d have no explanation for bands like Islands, The Shins and countless others who still find ways to put helium into a couple verses and a chorus and let go of their strings so they can float away forward the cloud that’s the furthest distance away. You can stand there on dry land, with a head tilted upward, jaw slackened and watch it rebel against gravity — until it’s just a pinprick up there with the gray or blue watercolors. It’s almost what “Don’t Call Me Whitney, Bobby” and Return To Sea are all about. Your hair will get messed up and your cheeks will get flush. Another thing you’ve got to give Islands is they’re now older than Unicorns ever got to be and covering “Monster Mash” may or may not be as cool as taking publicity photos in a bathtub full of hair.

LAST WEEK’S GREATNESS by Nick Diamonds of Islands
In sequential order,
1) Our exhaustive two-month tour of North America (and Iceland) ended in Buffalo, N.Y., following an entire year of touring. The band remains good friends, which is remarkable in and of itself!

2) I scuttled down to Philly to see my “special friend” and her lovely family for USA Xgiving.

3) I came back to Montreal just in time for a fake-surprise birthday party where I was made to feel special and important. As is now a two-year tradition, The Troggs “With a Girl Like You” was played on repeat 100 times. The 45 copy (from last year) was cracked from overplaying, so this year we sucked it up and went digital (thanks Andrew).

4) Dates and tahini

5) I started reading a good book — Paul Auster’s City of Glass, Part I of the New York Trilogy, with a cover illustrated by Art Spiegelman.

Islands
Equator Music