Top 13 Songs of 2012: #6 (Islands, "This Is Not a Song")

There I was, all ready to despise Islands.

In 2006, the Canadian band had a minor indie hit with "Rough Gem," a shapeshifting number with a peppy riff and a kitchen-sink aesthetic. It got passed around the nascent mp3 blogosphere, placed on a few best-of lists, and developed into a rousing concert closer.

But unlike their fellow montréalais Arcade Fire, who also broke through in the mid-aughts, Islands were not ready to be adored. Their music began to take on a willful inscrutability. Band members quit, returned, and quit again. And a few years ago, frontman Nicholas Thorburn announced in concert that he would henceforth refuse to sing "Rough Gem."

Granted, he was being partly, perhaps mostly, tongue-in-cheek. But it's clear that he was also being a bit of an asshole:

This next song we're about to do - it's an old song, and it's a song we all collectively don't like at all. And I think we're gonna retire it tonight... The song is called "Rough Gem." [Crowd cheers.] You shouldn't applaud, 'cause it's a shitty song... I'm not gonna sing it, 'cause I hate this fucking song so much. And here's how much I hate this song. I puked twice up there and then down there. Didn't tell anybody about it. 'Cause I wanted you to smell it. And now I think the whole venue smells like puke 'cause I didn't clean it up and didn't tell anybody. And then someone jerked off 'cause it smells like cum, so that helps. And then I dropped my phone in the toilet, which was cool. I don't know how that relates to this, but I just thought I'd tell you that. Anyway, so I'm not gonna sing "Rough Gem" tonight...

Congratulations, dude. You're better than "Rough Gem." What's more, you're better than anyone who enjoys "Rough Gem," including and especially your fans. You, my friend, are the greatest hipster of all time.

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All in all, I would have loved to have kept hating Islands, to have treasured them as my personal paragon of indie insufferability. But, damn it all, in the past six years Nicholas Thorburn has learned a thing or two about songwriting.

On 2012's underappreciated A Sleep and a Forgetting, he uses a minimal backdrop of piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Gone are the addled synthesizers, the jolting shifts in tempo, the GarageBand trickery. Vocals, lyrics, and melodies take center stage. And they're all stunningly well crafted.

The album's second track, "This Is Not a Song," rides a stately chord progression to violin-section solo straight out of R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts." It's a simple, gorgeous ballad - one that Islands should never give up singing.



"If this is just a song, / Then why-y-y-y-y do I fi-i-i-i-ind it so hard... to move on."