THE ISLANDS / YOUNG AND SEXY - Arm's Way / The Arc

By Simon Howell - A Listening Ear - 05/13/2008

2008 appears to be the year Canada goes prog. Seemingly, no major Canadian indie-rock release can get by without at least one ten-minute opus: we’ve already had Ladyhawk’s incendiary “Ghost Blues” (Shots) and Black Mountain’s 17-minute “Bright Lights” (In the Future). Not to be outdone, Wolf Parade’s forthcoming At Mount Zoomer caps off in spectacular fashion with a “Kissing the Beehive.” Before long we’ll be seeing a return to side-long epics that characterized album rock in the late '70s.

The first to try that on for size will doubtlessly be Islands’ Nick Thorburn, whose latest opus is entitled Arm’s Way -- and make no mistake, it’s an opus. It runs sixty-eight minutes, and boasts expansive orchestral arrangements on most of its tracks. It’s also almost impossible to traverse from beginning to end -- a fact that is undoubtedly lost on Thorburn, old-school champion of The Album that he is. Even if you can make it past the incredibly bloated opener, “The Arm” (which lies somewhere between a theme song for a late-90s Xena-esque TV show and a Vampire Weekend reject), you’ll be subjected to a cavalcade of sonic blunders on an epic scale. “Pieces of You” relies on its empty titular phrase like a hollow pirate leg ready to snap (the sort of cartoon metaphor Thorburn could get behind) even as its grandiose-yet-predictable string arrangement tries in vain to embiggen the track. Briefer pop tunes like “Creeper” and “J’aime Vous Voire Quitter” fare better largely due to their, well, brevity, but of course they take up less than a tenth of the total runtime, and even “J’aime” manages to squeeze in an awful, kitschy Graceland breakdown.

Besides the bloat (which only grows worse over the course of the record, with its last seven tracks all meandering past the five-minute mark), Arm’s Way isn’t aided by Thorburn’s bizarre insistence on loading his prog-lite tunes with lyrical references to physical trauma and tough-guy dilemmas. He’s plagued by attacking/invading forces (the “Arm” and the “Creeper”) and mentions being stabbed on at least two tracks, as well as pondering a “Life In Jail.” On the latter track, Thorburn complains that he’s “lost his way.” He seems intent on countering his aimlessness by throwing around random images of violence, but they ring false given the weightless nature of the arrangements. If the listener manages to make it all the way to the cloying Godspeed build of the 11-minute closer “Vertigo (If It’s A Crime)” and still feel convinced of Thorburn’s genius, then he’s precisely the auteur they deserve.

There’s more than one way to meander, though, a fact Vancouver’s Young And Sexy seem privy to. Their third full-length, Panic When You Find It, featured three-minute pop songs that seemed to float effortlessly through their thick harmonies and mellow guitar tones, with quick reprises and perfect sequencing making for one of the best indie-pop records to come out of Canada in the last decade. With The Arc, they take a turn away from the tangible pleasures of that record into an altogether different realm, not entirely unlike the one explored on sophomore album Life Through One Speaker’s more expansive tracks, but without the sense of punctuation provided on that album with songs like “Herculean Bellboy” and “Ella.” Instead, The Arc spends the entirety of its 42 minutes inhabiting a hallucinatory space, often employing unpredictable melodic turns, off-the-cuff vocal lines, and fluid guitar lines.

At first the approach is entirely successful -- the first four tracks effectively define the album’s mood and pace, while packing enough memorable progressions to maintain our interest. “The Poisoned Cup” boasts a great chorus that reflects the track’s hazy atmospherics (“I stole through the garden and fell to my knees / the air is thick, my time it’s gone to shit”), and opener “Saucerful of Fire” takes full advantage of the group’s trademark vocal harmonies. They let themselves drift a little too far, however, with a shapeless middle section characterized by songs that elude memory even after multiple listens (particularly the “Ella” sound-alike “Step Inside” and the pretty but shapeless “The Fog”). “Demon Dreaming” briefly resuscitates the record with its attractive rush, but ultimately “The Echo” and closer “Up in the Rafters” are little more than great bedtime music, which might be charming if they weren’t separated by a tuneless, half-speed Comets on Fire psych dirge called “Spill the Sky.” The Arc, appropriately enough, carries a certain narrative weight in its leaden movements, but can’t help feeling like a disappointment considering the group’s unerring focus in the past.

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