On New Year's Eve, I made a resolution to try and do one thing worth remembering each and every day of this year. The point of the resolution is to have something to say to people who ceaselessly ask, "What have you been doing lately?" when all you seem to remember of the last three months is the distinctly chewy texture of slightly-stale chocolate Teddy Grahams. Last year I attempted this, and though I spent January 1 at a store called Hobo, purchasing a plush horse-head on a stick, I recall nothing of the next 12 months. This year got me a little further, but before I knew it, it was 4 A.M. on January 3 and The Mighty Ducks was blaring in the other room. I am a failure.
Islands, on the other hand, are ready for 2007 in a way that few are. They've been readying new material for their follow-up to last year's Return To The Sea (TMT Review) and are entering the studio in February to crank out tha tunez. While I was buying a gumball from the machine outside of Meijer, Nick Thorburn and his friends were making songs "10 minutes long with innumerable key & tempo changes, modulation, genre-meddling bombastic progressive rock existential death-defying dangerousness." And I'm cool with that.
"Hey!" you might say. "Did you just write Nick Thorburn?? Don'tcha mean Nick Diamonds???" I hope you might say that. Hell, I hope that someone, somewhere is reading this. Regardless, your lukewarm potential concern is touching. Yes, Nick Diamonds has indeed cast off his flashy alias and reverted to his real name, though Thornburn sounds pretty badass if you think about it. I've had a lot of time to think about it in between swigs of Mountain Dew.
Apparently the group has been so productive that it has a slew of shorter, "more subdued" pop songs on hand that they might try to do something with, if they have time. Which they will. Album title and tracklisting are forthcoming (slackers!!), but chances are they'll release that information before I get home from Blockbuster.
