I Ate My DVD Collection

I hope to get at least a couple reviews in today to catch up on my laziness, then hopefully be back to normal.  I realized that in the past couple of days, I had gotten used to not reviewing because of the thumb, and had thus not left enough time to watch/listen to anything new.  Also, having now seen the Dark Knight myself twice, I’m pondering having a go at my own review of that, but it would probably abbreviated and have the function of filling in some things I haven’t read about in other reviews but I thought stood out a little.

I only got to see Islands for about 45 minutes of what seemed like an hour and a quarter-long set at Siren Music Festival, and I was less enthusiastic about them than my companions, and we agreed that it was probably because I’d already heard them on their album, so it didn’t strike me as novel, and I had already pretty much made up my mind about the band.  But I’ll talk more about that in my upcoming (read: as soon as BOTO lets me) review of the festival on another, more widely read medium.

Arm’s Way, Islands’ second album, was almost as hard to make up my mind over than Coldplay, because it doesn’t just have both good and bad, it has great and horrible, often at the same time, and I think I know why.  The music is very compelling, lots of good, tight harmonizing here, with good energy throughout, but the lyrics are so intellectually bankrupt that I just can’t get behind them.  It just seems like lead singer/songwriter Nick Thorburn just looked for words that kind of made sense in a rhyming dictionary.  There’s no heart, no sincerity to them.  In “Creeper”, he sings: “Right from the start, I was stabbed in the heart/didn’t/know i wasnt breathing/didn’t know i had been bleeding”.  Groan.  From opener “The Arm,” he opens with “You faded into/a different shade/a completely different hue/of a kind of blue”.  And no, blue has nothing to do with the rest of the song.

Really, this album seems like a poor man’s version of Muse, the band that is huge everywhere but America, and probably the most mainstream of all of my favorite bands.  Muse’s songwriting chops aren’t really up to snuff in regards to the other bands I listen to, but the music is put together really well, and the music has a lot of charisma and a lot of “sing-a-long-ability”, in addition to an edginess that makes even the major-key songs seem a little aggressive.  Basically the same is true of Arm’s Way, only the songwriting is even worse, and the music is not quite as good, though it’s close.

Final gripe with this album: it’s long, and too one-note to get away with it.  Though it only has 12 tracks, it runs 68 minutes long, and that’s because the second half of the album is exclusively songs that are 5 minutes and up, with the closer, “Vertigo (If It’s A Crime)” being an inexplicable 11 minutes long.  But I’ll cut the review off here, to prevent similarities.