Nick Diamonds likes messing with journalists as much as he does his audience, but it’s more an offhanded lob than a pointed attack.
When his Montreal-based band Islands plays the Larimer Lounge on Saturday, expect the same playful subterfuge that has come to characterize his band’s public face.
Case in point: A press release accompanying Islands’ new album, “Return to the Sea,” insists principals Diamonds and J’aime Tambeur (formerly of short-lived indie buzz band the Unicorns) reconnected on the set of the Woody Allen film “Melinda, Melinda, Melinda,” a Seinfeld-quality fake name if ever there was one.
False.
It also says Islands tour guitarist Jim Guthrie is grandson of the legendary Woody Guthrie.
False.
“We just do that to (mess) with lazy journalists,” Diamonds admitted over the phone from a Massachusetts tour stop.
Indeed, more than a few sloppy websites have taken that info and run with it. But fans of Diamonds’ old band should take heart, because it implies he has not changed much since disbanding the Unicorns in late 2004.
Their album, “Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?” earned an 8.9 out of 10 on the prestigious PitchforkMedia.com, setting off a wave of adoration among lo-fi indie popsters.
While Islands’ “Return to the Sea” is one of the year’s best albums, it doesn’t always reflect the same loose, fuzzy attitude. World-music influences (steel drums and calypso rhythms on “Jogging Gorgeous Summer”) and hip-hop flourishes replace some of the absurdly distorted keyboards that populated “Who Will Cut Our Hair?”
“The (change) was spontaneous but inevitable,” Diamonds said. “We weren’t crunching numbers and codes into a computer to get those sounds, just making the kind of music that was coming out of our heads. We’re not claiming to break new ground, but we’re not just listening to one style of music and making that.”
The band’s creatively fertile hometown of Montreal probably precludes that fact, as acts like the Arcade Fire, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Wolf Parade have sprung from that French-speaking city the past few years. Members of Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade and others also lent their instrumental talents to “Return to the Sea.”
“We didn’t go out of our way to make the (collaborations) a focus for this record,” Diamonds said. “It wasn’t this forced, strategic alliance. They’re just friends and roommates who play music that we’ve known for years.”
Jim Guthrie, formerly of Toronto alt-country titan Royal City, has joined Islands for its U.S. tour. Does that make Islands another Canadian indie supergroup in the vein of New Pornographers?
“I’m sure another supergroup from another part of the world will strike us down in the super-band wars,” Guthrie said. “They’ll use their laser vision to melt our amps and guitars.”
Guthrie then attested to Islands’ weirdness with an example: The band took its entire audience out after a recent show for a pickup game of basketball.
Is he to be believed?
“Nick just acts really spontaneously, and I’m never quite sure what’s going to happen,” he said.
That much can be corroborated. During a 2004 Unicorns show at Rock Island in Denver – April Fools Day, as it turns out – Diamonds deposited a Santa Claus dummy in a cage and proceeded to pantomime sex with it. He then jumped on the shoulders of local music maniac Magic Cyclops and rode him around the venue, eventually falling flat on his face from 6 feet up.
“I think this time will probably be a little more reserved, but who knows?” Diamonds said. “I woke up supremely ill the next day from (that show) and vomited my brains out. You can’t do that every night.”
If Diamonds & Crew keep pulling the rug out from under everyone at the right times, they won’t have to.
0Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-820-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
Islands
INDIE ROCK|Larimer Lounge, 2721 Larimer St.; 7 p.m. Saturday; all ages; with Cadence Weapon, Busdriver, Magic Cyclops|$12|BigMarksTickets.com
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