Islands drift off to sea

The best I can say about Arm's Way is that it shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the reason why The Unicorns were so good on Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? -- or the reason Islands were as decent as they were on Return To The Sea -- can in no way be attributed to Nick Diamonds (or Nick Thorburn, or whatever name he wants to use). Alternately, Arm's Way is a pretty convincing argument that all the praise for The Unicorns/Islands' debut deserves to go to Jaime Thompson/J'aime Tambeur (with perhaps a nod to Alden Penner, until Clues finally release something and settle the question once and for all).

In all honesty, that's about the most complimentary thing I can say about this abomination of an album that Islands have released. Arm's Way is terrible. Awful. Odiously, horribly, offensively, pathetically horrendously rotten. Perhaps if Diamonds hadn't once been one-third of the band that released one of the seminal albums of the music renaissance this country has been enjoying for the last half-decade or so, there wouldn't be expectations for this, and then...no, I can't even say that. As much as I like Who Will Cut Our Hair..., I can't say that I was going into Arm's Way expecting Unicorns Redux.

What I was expecting, thanks to Return To The Sea, was an album that was fun, poppy and, above all else, not an overblown monstrosity. Or, at least, palatable. Yet, as Diamonds shows time and again (and again, and again, and again) on Arm's Way, he never met a melody he couldn't throw a string section at and overproduce into unlistenable oblivion. This may sound like an exaggeration, but I can only think of one song that doesn't sound like Diamonds trying his best to show his "mature", more serious side -- "Creeper", which also happens to be the only song on Arm's Way that doesn't make me want to sell Who Will Cut Our Hair... and Return To The Sea just for the crime of reminding me of this atrocity. It can't even be said that, in spite of all the bombast, at least he doesn't bring in a choir...because he does, right at the end of "I Feel Evil Creeping In", right around the time I actually thought to myself "Hey, for all this album's terribleness, at least he didn't invite a choir to sing along. Oh, wait, he did."

Speaking of Diamonds' more mature/serious side, that's probably Arm's Way's biggest problem (in much the same way that the Titanic's biggest problem was that one iceberg). There's not a single moment where the album sounds like Diamonds had fun making it. Even at the end of "In The Rushes, when Diamonds liberally lifts a section of The Who's "A Quick One While He's Away" -- which is kind of fun, as Who songs tend to be -- it sounds like he's doing it less because he actually enjoys the original than because he's intent on making sure people think of Arm's Way as a serious work of art, a classic record that will stand up alongside anything to which you want to compare it (like, say, The Who). The result is so execrable that I'd say that hopefully the guardians of the Who catalogue hear it and sue Diamonds for every penny he makes off of Arm's Way, except I'm also hoping that somehow its very existence will vanish into the ether without a trace and the whole thing will never be heard from, thought of, or conceptualized in any way, shape or form ever again.

In other words, it's a bad album.