When we last left the Mary Onettes, the Swedish quartet was diligently channeling the sounds of the 1980s without a lick of the irony that often imbues such revivalism. Their retro moves seemed less about building upon the decade's musical legacy as encapsulating its finer points for consumption by a new generation. Which, hey, was a perfectly cool way to go about things. At their best, the band positively nailed the bruised romanticism and exquisite melancholy that marked a certain strain of that decade's best pop, and besides, most of the signature propagators of said pop were by then long gone or, worse yet, distant shadows of their former selves. Plus it's not like you'll catch any of the old guard in the tiny-ish clubs and early-afternoon festival slots the Mary Onettes are used to playing, so for those seeking stadium-sized grandeur in parlor-intimate spaces, the band has something relatively unique to offer. The self-titled The Mary Onettes from 2007, in fact, turned out not unlike many records from the era it emulated: several excellent singles or would-be singles ("Lost", "Slow", "Void", "Under the Guillotine"), the token slow jam ("The Laughter"), an effective opener and closer ("Pleasure Songs" and "Still", respectively), and, well, some not terribly memorable stuff in between. All of which makes Islands, the Mary Onettes' follow-up, an at once enchanting and frustrating listen. Yes, the high points of the previous record are duplicated here-- but so too are the same problems that occasionally bogged down that record.
Opener "Puzzles" actually betters The Mary Onettes' lead track, the great-tune-with-questionable-lyrics "Pleasure Songs", galloping along on a spritely keyboard riff and setting an appropriate tone for the nine tracks to follow. "Let's talk about what feels strange on the inside," vocalist Philip Ekström offers, an apt enough invitation to the scores of disaffected youngsters with which this sort of music has always resonated best. "Dare", "Symmetry", and "The Disappearance of My Youth", then, are the hot singlez here, and each has the band showing off a few new tricks. "Symmetry" gets extra sentimental with the strings, "Dare" soars near the heights of "Lost" on the strength of plenty of "ooohs" and "ahhhs", and "Disappearance" features-- what else?-- a children's choir joining in to sing the title line. Their brief major label dalliance a half decade behind them, it's clear the Mary Onettes' ambitions haven't wavered in the least. Elsewhere, a few numbers-- notably the slow jam ("Cry for Love") and the closer ("Bricks")-- fall short of their counterparts on LP1. The former lacks the poise and grace of "The Laughter", while the latter generally sounds like a limp rehash of several earlier tracks on Islands, very much in want of a distinguishing feature. At least "Still" settled on a strident march beat that evoked a spirited departure off into the sunset (or, better yet, the rain); "Bricks" just kind of meanders off in a mid-tempo haze.
Indeed, distinction would serve the rest of the tracks on Islands well; as on The Mary Onettes, the stuff in between here tends to drift by largely unnoticed. Ekström has stated that the title Islands refers to how "every song is like a record of its very own," and ironically this is perhaps the biggest snare this time around: without a sonic story arc of sorts to create continuity across Islands, we're encouraged to hold the tracks against one another (hence the partitioning above into "great" and "just okay" camps) rather than consider them in relation to the whole of the album. In short, somebody needs to introduce these guys to transitions, interludes, intros, outros, deliberate sketches, ambience, that sort of thing (although, in fairness, Islands does open with a nice bit of panoramic, cloud-parting feedbackery)-- a means to more effectively tie all these so-called "islands" together. The otherwise unremarkable "Century" includes a telling line: "I've never been good at holding back," Ekström declares there. Until he is, the Mary Onettes will likely remain a killer singles band that makes just pretty good albums.
