Islands (pop music should be popular)

I have been listening this week to an album of epic, overwrought, pretentious pop-rock that cribs heavily from influential bands and producers of at least four decades. No, not the fucking Coldplay album, a collection of songs best described as a carton of watery bollock yoghurt, wanked off by pedestrian talent to slosh around the ears and brains of motorists who purchase one whole album every twelve months to soundtrack their own soul-suffocating mediocrity. Definitely not that.



I digress. The album I've been thoroughly enjoying is the new Islands release, Arm's Way, a bright and colourful patchwork of classic pop, bulging with ideas, hooks, choruses. Okay, it's not perfect, but it's the sort of album that deserves all the attention that less interesting, infinitely more wanky bands get, and that just winds me up. If half the people who bought the new Coldplay album were to buy Arm's Way, it would still hit the UK album top 10, and Islands would get the popular adulation that they quite rightly deserve. And the radio-listening public should fucking love these songs, they should love love love them, but there just seems to be this permanent block on clever pop music, that it will never quite penetrate the public consciousness in the same way that humdrum drivel by lacklustre songwriters does.

So. This is more a rant than a review. I am unrepentant. This is a constant annoyance for me; brilliant bands with all the pop sensibilities of Phil Spector and Black Francis in a centrifuge are overlooked in favour of flavourless generica. While this is not new, it's a problem that infuriates me all the more since the boundaries of the old industry are supposedly crumbling around our ears, but no-one seems even slightly interested.

Oh, internet. Listen to the new Islands album and hear that it is good. Not flawless, not amazing, but a thoroughly enjoyable romp through pops greenest, spongiest pastures.

(I am now deliberately posting the bleakest song from the album ('though it's still great fun!))
I Feel Evil Creeping In - Islands