Who is Nick Thorburn? Up to this point, it's been hard to tell. As figurehead for the six-years-strong Islands, he's been an artistic vagrant, switching from strummy, beached Graceland-isms, to avant-rap experiments, to overblown indie pomp, to squishy, Auto-Tuned synth-pop-- sometimes, within the same record. Side projects like Human Highway and Mister Heavenly have gone great lengths to mine his appreciation for the garage pop of the 1950s and 60s, but have revealed relatively little; last year's pay-what-you-want solo album under his Nick Diamonds alias, I Am an Attic, was a cleaning-house collection that didn't provide much help either. Even the album that was responsible for Thorburn's rise to mid-level recognition, the Unicorns' 2003 effort Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, provides few clues (no pun intended)-- both because he hasn't produced that brand of ecstatically demented indie rock since, and because the band imploded a year after the album's release.
Thorburn's relative artistic facelessness is made more complicated by the fact that Islands is, essentially, a solo project itself; since the 2006 debut, Return to the Sea, no Islands record has featured the same personnel, with former Unicorns member Jaime Thompson leaving the band previous to 2008's Arm's Way and returning for the following year's pop-fixated Vapours. For Islands' latest, A Sleep & a Forgetting, the lineup's changed again, with Thompson departing shortly after the last record was released. Claiming that this record is different from its predecessor is something of a folly in itself-- every Islands record is a change-up from the one previous, almost to a fault-- but regardless, it feels like a curtain's been pulled back for the first time. It's the most cohesive-- and, possibly, the out-and-out strongest-- Islands record yet, one that retains a singular focus while zooming in on an artist who's preferred to remain at a distance, obscured by so many stylistic gambits, for so long.
Ironically, the renewed passion existent in A Sleep & a Forgetting can be credited to a loss of passion in Thorburn's personal life. In a recent interview with Vulture, he revealed that the album's creation was spurred on by a bad breakup and subsequent self-exile to "a friend of a friend's" place in Los Angeles, where he largely wrote the record's songs on piano. Thorburn's described A Sleep & a Forgetting as "confessional," and it indeed finds him at his most lyrically direct and naked, whether it be the open-ended questions asked to no one on the album's beautifully burnt-out penultimate track, "Don't I Love You", or the opening couplet on "Can't Feel My Face", which pretty much spells it out for you: "I miss my wife/ I miss my best friend."
Confessional intimacy needs an intimate setting to match, so the behind-the-boards inclusion of Rob Schnapf, who co-produced a large amount of Elliott Smith's discography, was an inspired choice. Schnapf keeps things as unfussy as possible, which is fitting since A Sleep & a Forgetting is a particularly unfussy album of capital-S "songs." As with Human Highway and Mister Heavenly, Thorburn's still drawing from garage-pop and singer/songwriter sounds of yester-yesteryear, but save for a few minor flourishes here and there-- the chilled-veins AOR pop of "This Is Not a Song", a "96 Tears"-worthy lick of dirty organ that writhes through "Can't Feel My Face"-- there's nothing that distracts from the songwriting, which is unarguably as strong as it's been since the Nick Diamonds' days as a Unicorn.
A Sleep & a Forgetting is a small album, both by design and in its impact; there are no grand statements made, musical or otherwise, and since this is, really, 37 minutes of no-frills, room-temperature indie pop proper, it's incredibly easy to let this record get lost in the breeze. This isn't a bad thing, though-- in fact, it's something of a triumph for Thorburn, to match his most emotionally devastating material yet with music that's so close-sounding and unassumingly, unabashedly pretty. There's humanity in these songs, a quality that was muddled in the noise of Arm's Way and Return to the Sea, and sidelined during Human Highway and Mister Heavenly's genre excursions (however pleasurable they might have been). When Jaime Thompson left Islands for the first time, Thorburn memorably and amicably proclaimed, "Islands are forever." Maybe a repurposed album title from his old band would work better this time around: Islands are people too.
