"The Arm" is a great example of how Nick Thorburn, in his total body of work, has been able to co-opt the trite and cliche and turn them into song-writing miracles. The heavy-metal riff and sappy violins initially hearken back to A-Team era theme music; but upon further spins, "The Arm" grasps the listener and pulls him toward Islands's unique world, a realm that reaches us through defaced tropical postcards and misplaced limbs.  

Thorburn has said of the new album that "it's a physical record. It's someone plunging your face into a river and rescuing you. If *Return to the Sea* was the water record, this is the bodies." The characters in his songs can never quite place themselves or see the ocean for the waves. Emotions congeal into physical oddities and body parts are invested with more power than the organic whole ("Let your arms carry you"). One of the best lines of this tasty preview describes how "The veins made some stains when they burst from your legs/ Your anxiety's a tapestry." Perhaps Thorburn avoids the cliches of bodily metaphor by dividing them and taking them out of context, creating disembodied lyrics about a disembodied arm.      

Musically, the song rides on the momentum of "Return to the Sea," an album that fused shut many of the ex-Unicorn's glitchy musical tendencies, aiming toward a more "solid" aesthetic. Thorburn even told ((Pitchfork)) some months back that he decided to scrap his little pop ditties for a record of more ambitious scope. "The Arm" descends with even more muscle than the rocking "Swans," owing in part to the absence of Tambeur's skittering beats and the addition of a more crushing rhythm section; the string sections also point to a more crisp production.

All in all, this is an Islands song.  The composition is nested between sections of jungle atmospherics, and changes course many times throughout: there are the violin explosions, the riffy bridges, the minimalist piano breakdowns, and the vacillating chord changes. And who can resist Thorburn's vocal ticks? It's about time to get our hopes up, guys. [Stream on Myspace]