The first time I saw Nick Thorburn perform he was wearing a pink tuxedo, and with good reason: although his group, the Unicorns, sang songs about things like death, ghosts and nautical catastrophe, they did so with the youthful exuberance of mischievous teenagers headed to prom. Thorburn and his bandmates took to the stage, then the rafters, then the outstretched hands of an audience full of newly-minted fans.

The Unicorns blew up, burned out and called it off, and since then Thorburn’s been making his way with a new outfit called Islands (for a while fellow Unicorn Jamie Thompson joined the band’s frequently-shifting lineup, too). The band’s first, somewhat schizophrenic album exhibited many of the same spooky preoccupations as Thorburn’s previous work, and received a generally warm reception. Islands’ second album dropped on Tuesday and, while being acknowledged as a step forward, seems to have attracted at least somewhat less enthusiasm. Some reviewers are complaining that the dense arrangements are overdone. To my ear, the real problem is the sense of lifelessness that seems to emerge from complex orchestration, exactingly performed. The record has some things going for it, but few of the ones that made me a fan of Thorburn’s in the first place. So when Nick took the Black Cat stage last night sporting a face made ashen by makeup and a shirt with an artfully applied bloodstain over his heart, I was worried that his costume would prove just as apt as that tuxedo had been.

Photo of Nicholas Thorburn of Islands by RHITMrB, used by permission.