Critiques CD: Islands | A Sleep and a Forgetting

Nicholas Thorburn’s fourth album under the Islands moniker sounds more like the unused excess from painfully kitsch project Mister Heavenly than a follow-up to Islands’ acclaimed albums Return to the Sea (2006) and Arm’s Way (2008). The album is comprised almost exclusively of a morose, slow-motion mashup of Islands-meets-doo-wop, weighed down by uninspired, one-dimensional lyrics and tedious instrumentation. A Sleep and a Forgetting is actually a succinct description of the album as a whole: it puts you to sleep and sounds like Thorburn forgot how he used to make interesting music. The entire album is such an unhappy misfit in the Islands repertoire that these songs would have been better reserved for another of his side-projects.