ISLANDS
WHAT OCCURS (GOLD VINYL) - LP

UPC: 634457173590
Label: ELF
Format: LP
Release Date: June 21, 2024
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What Occurs, the tenth album in the project’s 18-year history, marks a significant shift for the band. Foregoing the meticulous production of 2021’s Islomania and 2023’s fine-tuned follow up, And That’s Why Dolphins Lost their Legs, the brand new record strips away detailed ornamentation for something much more immediate, raw and natural.

Nick Thorburn, the bandleader, had this to say:

“For the first time ever, we went in cold. I brought over two dozen songs into the studio on Vancouver Island. We sat facing one another in the live room, and I played the songs through for the band [Evan Gordon, Geordie Gordon, Adam Halferty]. Together we ran through the material, and very quickly, after the songs were under our fingers, we pushed record. Decisions had to be made very quickly.”

With an intent to capture the raw spontaneity from a band that has played together for a decade, Thorburn and co. recorded the songs live in the room, all together, with guitar amps and vocal mics bleeding into one another on multiple occasions.

Each song on the album is told from a different voice, like characters in a short story collection: There’s the lovelorn loser (“Drown A Fish”), the spellbound lover (“Tangerine”), and the doomscroller bracing for armageddon time (“What Occurs”). There’s the terrified idiot who thinks arachnophobia refers to a fear of snakes (“Arachnophobia”), and the kind soul who tries to let you down gently (“Sally Doesn’t Work Here Anymore”). We ride alongside the art thief who very nearly gets away with it (“David Geffen’s Jackson Pollock”), and bear witness to a liberation movement unfolding in real time (“Talk Is Cheap”). The songs’ narrators are afraid, outraged, turned on and hopelessly in love, running from—and towards life & death and everything in between.

Stylistically, the songs range from the apocalyptic folk of “On the Internet”—with Thorburn sharing his rarely featured baritone—to the druggy, Jupiter-4 synthesizer dream pop of “Sally Doesn’t Work Here Anymore”. Album opener and title track “What Occurs”, acts as a bit of misdirection, with a Penguin Cafe-esque piano plunking notes like a sequencer as it slow-burns towards a mandolin solo of all things.

“That song is a response to the previous album, which featured drum machines heavily,” Thorburn says. “I was so burnt out on all that programming and sequencing, so as kind of an inside joke, I mimicked a sequencer, but with acoustic instruments. It’s just piano, acoustic guitar, voice and mandolin.”

From there, the album takes a quick left turn, with the up-tempo power pop earworm of “Drown A Fish”. “Arachnophobia” showcases the ‘60s inspired, Stax-style playing that guitarist Geordie Gordon excels in and the relentless salvo of angry guitar stabs on “Talk Is Cheap” contrast nicely with the chugging ‘70s soft rock electric piano stomp of “Move Some More”.

This is a physical record. Just two weeks prior to recording, Thorburn suffered a ghastly basketball injury, which left him in a sling with a separated shoulder. Despite this minor setback, the band soldiered on and Thorburn played through the pain. In a display of catharsis, the deranged garage rock freak out of “Boll Weevil”, found Thorburn down on all fours in the center of the room, howling like a wild animal.

Though currently based in Los Angeles, Thorburn was born and raised on Vancouver Island, and though his first band The Unicorns began there, this is his first record made there.

“With recording [this record] entirely in my home province of British Columbia, I wanted to tap into my Canadian forebears a little bit. It’s subtle, but I wanted to acknowledge the greats that came before me, like Destroyer, Teenage Head, Nash the Slash, Rufus Wainwright, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, and of course Neil [Young], Joni [Mitchell] & Leonard [Cohen].”

Produced entirely by the band in the summer of 2023, and mixed by Colin Stewart (New Pornographers, Destroyer) in the fall of 2023, this is the only Canadian-made Islands record since the 2006 debut, Return to the Sea.