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Artist Islands

  • islands Aliya Naumoff

The Montreal band Islands was born from the ashes of The Unicorns, a college-radio mainstay that effortlessly melded childlike instrumentation with brooding themes and a larger-than-life creation myth. The Unicorns proved a bit too volatile, so frontman Nick Diamonds dissolved the band and formed Islands, taking his old band’s knack for melody and fusing it with rich instrumentation—dueling violins, plenty of xylophone and organ—and a structural complexity that never ceases to surprise. Islands’ 2009 album, Vapours, traffics in threads of disco laced throughout the usual tangled bits and pieces of rock. Diamonds’ involvement in Mister Heavenly—a “doom-wop” collab with Man Man’s Honus Honus and Modest Mouse drummer Joe Plummer—kept him occupied for much of 2011, but he still found time to record a new Islands’ record, A Sleep & A Forgetting, which surfaced last week.

Updated 02/08/2012

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