Islands
Return To The Sea

THE REVIEW

With the great classics it's easy, you buy a Sixties “Blonde On Blonde” and you know you have a piece of history in your hands and, immediately after, an unforgettable experience from such an immense artist eternally imprinted in your mind…

But for anyone, from the well-established critic to the simple seeker of novelty, now in 2006, taking a stance on a newly released album is either a way to make oneself heard or very arduous… For this sparkling debut from a Canadian band there's surely plenty to be enthusiastic about…

Their world is that of the most oblique and independent pop of the early millennium but “Return To The Sea” has something more than other bands of the genre (I'm thinking of, say, 'Architecture In Helsinki'); the impact is of those that floor you, “Swans”, the first track that touches ten minutes, has a lightness, a grace that slowly creeps in, first with a delicate arpeggio, then a melody from a slightly strangled voice in the throat, from swallowed tears, first it sweetly cradles you and then starts, becomes more penetrating, shakes you, engages you, transports you, then calms down again, a crystalline piano accompanies a guitar that is first softly electrified and then at the seventh minute releases into a catharsis of emotions held back until that moment. It is perhaps the paradigm of the album…

We have entered their world, a spell from which it is truly impossible to escape until the last note because the songs maintain a high emotional charge and above all their freshness is marvelous. Their style could be called a “complex simplicity” that gives the whole album a sort of strange and deep “cold emotion” that transforms small pop gems, with all their references to other voices and sounds, into something else, something close but at the same time distant, in time and space, ungraspable…