Music review: Islands

By Adam Rydell, KJHK rotation DJ

Thursday, October 8, 2009

A blend of dance tunes and pleasant synthesized rock makes up Islands’ new album, Vapours.

With a pretty exciting lineup of instruments including the omnichord, mellotron and electric sitar, how can you go wrong? There’s a full set of keyboards and a drum machine, but they didn’t leave out the traditional rock guitars, bass and acoustic drums.

Vapours is really a healthy blend of cheerful electro-pop-rock with a warm summer feeling to it. To me the highlight of the album is the second track — “No You Don’t.” It’s a great, positive dance song and I admit I’m biased towards uncommon instruments, but those light omnichord chords and that electric sitar solo towards the end is just so frickin’ cool.

As a whole, the album is great. It keeps up momentum until the end and really I’d recommend any of the tracks on the album.

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