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Photo by Aliya Naumoff

Jun 20, 2009 Islands By Kyle Lemmon

Montreal’s Islands have already made two albums of schizophrenic pop music and on September 22nd, Anti- will release their third musical hallucination, Vapours. Of course, the latest Islands’ full-length comes at us from the adventurous mind of former Unicorn and current Human Highway hombre, Nick Thorburn, aka Nick Diamonds. Thorburn produced the LP with Yeah Yeah Yeahs/TV on the Radio knob twiddler Chris Coady. On a Twitter post last Monday, Thorburn wrote that the band had completed the disc and another post announced the indie-pop band was in the midst of “sequencing the album, doin’ the fades and outputting a master(piece).” The mastering of the 42-minute and 34-second “master(piece)” went down at New York’s Sterling Sound with Greg Calbi (Antony and the Johnsons/Grizzly Bear). Rounding out the producing crew is programmer/Wolf Parade keyboardist Hadji Bakara. Thorburn has described Vapours as a more “minimal” release than last year’s rock-centric Arm’s Way.

And to the great surprise of longstanding Unicorns fans everywhere, former drummer Jamie Thompson (or J’aime Tambeur) has rejoined Islands. Thompson co-recorded Islands’ 2006 debut Return to the Sea with Thorburn but left the band for Arm’s Way. If you don’t remember, Thompson’s original farewell statement on Islands’ website, read a little like this, “The fact is that I don’t need to be in a band anymore. I think Islands is one of the best, if not the best band out these days, and I have every confidence that they will do incredibly well. I’m just not sure that being in a successful band is all that important to me anymore. I’m not leaving because of any problems with people in the band. It’s very hard to do this, Nick and I have been creating together for quite a long time now…” Now, with Thompson’s triumphant return, it looks like Islands really are forever.