Islands Live!

Islands
Metro, Chicago
Thursday, May 17, 2006

The primary thing Islands have working against them is their past — O.K., a second is their sense of how to close a show, but we’ll get to that later. Being remnants of The Unicorns, an inventive but incoherent early-millennium indie rock act, invites skepticism and likely will keep some potential fans away. While both bands are of the same cloth, that argument has little on which to stand.

Return To The Sea, released this spring on Equator, is an instant classic in the mode of The Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B.”: exultant instrumentalism juxtaposed by downer lyrics. Frontman/everyman Nick Diamonds and drummer J’aime Tambeur cakewalk through 10 tracks of pure pop pubescence, dragging behind them a mordant cloud of fear, discomfort, and an unnerving abundance of water-death imagery.

The challenge, live, would be to recreate their toy orchestra (charrango, French horn, steak fiddle, recorder, steel drum, washboard, and synthesizer) to maintain the musical naïveté and keep the guitars — as many as three at a time — from overdriving the set all over the place. Yet it was they, the core duo, holding things up. While four other musicians chimed in on bass, synths, brass, violins, and whatever else was in the stew, Tambeur sounded as if he was striking cardboard boxes in the garage while Diamonds’ stonehanded guitar technique skewed a rhythm here and there.

Diamonds could be an electric frontman when he so chose, running across the stage and through the crowd during the opening “Humans,” and later lighting a roman candle attached to his headstock to intro “I Feel Evil.” But he could also be a sarcastic bore, calling the new “Pieces Of You” a Jewel song (it’s the title of her first album) and having the audience slowdance stiff-armed to “If” “or we’ll end the show early.”

But even he was swept up in the giddiness of “Volcanoes,” the pseudo mic battle between openers Cadence Weapon and Busdriver on “Where There’s A Will, There’s A Whalebone,” and the chirpy, audience-adored “Don’t Call Me Whitney, Bobby.” Despite the fun, the decision to close with “Swans” was a miscalculation. Presented with a more starkly rendered guitar pattern than the album version, Diamonds seemed to lose himself in dour lyrics, “I woke up thirsty the day I died/And the tide was swirling/My mouth is so dry/And all I see is sea to shining seas.” An endless, classic rock coda sent the Metro packing and maybe thinking a little Unicorns at the end would have gone a long way.

— Steve Forstneger

Category: Live Reviews, Weekly