If Islands’ last record, (2021’s Islomania) was a Saturday Night Fever dream, then the follow up–And That’s Why Dolphins Lost Their Legs–is the Sunday Morning comedown. “[Islomania] was exuberant and hopeful, and Dolphins is like the grim rejoinder,” songwriter Nick Thorburn says. “The songs attempt to tap into some of our darker impulses. The grim, unshakeable feeling that we live in hell, that there is no future, that all hope is lost. I wanted to explore those depths and see where it lead me.” Hopelessness aside, the collection of songs represents a big leap forward. With addictive hooks at every possible turn, Dolphins (the 9th record in the catalogue), stands out as quite likely the strongest and most articulate Islands album yet. Nick Thorburn and band manage to slyly tap into both the pain and the joy of living, often simultaneously, while stripping the music down to its simplest element: a strange sample rubbing up against a bouncing bassline, a snappy kick and snare firing off against a persistent, hooky guitar line. The music itself is settled on the spaces in between: the silences, the spareness. There’s an evocative wooziness within each song; a disorienting disassociation that draws you into its strange world. “I was in my head/all my friends and all my lovers dead,” Thorburn sings on the second song, “And All You Can Do Is Laugh”. Ruminating on a world being destroyed before our eyes, Thorburn, sounding like an acquiescent ghost, continues on: “Something’s changed/ Something’s wrong/Something strange must be going on/Since it came/Things just aren’t the same/You see the light/Coming over the hill/From up in the sky/Like a thief they come in the night”. Where do you go from there? Darker, it seems. And yet, always with a sense of humor. “Headlines” paints the picture of a feckless passenger in a car, helplessly careening into a tree during a volatile argument with a partner. But all the passenger can think about is how the event will be framed in next day’s papers. The paper’s headline: “Poor Tree, (Man Died).” The writing process began a lot differently, though. Initially, Nick had no intention of writing songs in the way he knew how. “During my time off from Islands, before releasing Islomania, I was finished with rock music, bored of the lyrics I was writing. I was toying with the idea of making…I’m embarrassed to say… beats.” Thorburn says, with a laugh. “I began tinkering at home, and quite quickly compiled a huge folder of instrumentals. I got together with my friend Fat Tony and we made a few songs together. But as things went along, I found myself getting increasingly excited by the possibility of a lyric here or there. At first it was just a hook, and then a verse. Before long, I was sitting on a big pile of Islands songs.” The songs, though, are more idiosyncratic and off-kilter than Islands has sounded in a while. And that’s a good thing. Though refined and deliberate, the music has a certain playfulness that Thorburn hasn’t tapped into in quite some time. The record is a notable departure from previous outings, but the DNA of Thorburn’s early work, namely his first band The Unicorns, can clearly be heard throughout songs like “Headlines“, “Life’s A Joke” and “And All You Can Do is Laugh”. Thorburn elaborates on one of the album’s main themes: “I was interested in the idea of regression. Evolution in the opposite direction, you know? We think of fish evolving by growing legs—walking out of the primordial swamp towards an enlightened existence—but what if things went the other way? What if a four legged dolphin took one look around, saw what humans had done, and said ‘fuck it, I’m going back in’?” “And actually,” Thorburn says, “the title itself came from a conversation I overheard between a couple of strange men in a friend’s backyard in Los Angeles, one of whom insisted that dolphins did in fact evolve to have legs at one point, but very quickly returned to the ocean, going back the other way.” While Dolphins began the journey at his home in Los Angeles, Thorburn eventually traveled to famed Hollywood studio Sunset Sound to work with Chris Coady (“Feel A Way”), upstate New York with Ratatat’s Mike Stroud (“Pelican”) and finally landing back in Los Feliz with producer Patrick Ford for the rest of the batch. This final stage in the process gave the songs their legs, allowing them the room to evolve out of the primal goo and live freely in the world. And It was here that the light started shining through. “This record is me at my most bleak, unquestionably,” Thorburn says. “But there’s a point to it all. It’s not just gleeful nihilism. With the song ‘Superstitious’, I imagined what might happen if I just succumbed to the chaos; let it wash over me. If you can weather that storm, you can hit upon something quite beautiful. Something that feels outside of you, something almost supernatural. Maybe that’s what grace is.” The album’s final track (“Up The Down Staircase”) flips the whole thesis on its axis: Shit’s fucked, no doubt about it, but what if we persevere? About this, Thorburn says: “I love the writing of Kim Stanley Robinson and the future he imagines for us. It’s tough, but it’s not a cheap dystopia. We have to work hard at making the world a better place. It’s about overcoming the obstacles and going about things the hard way, towards a graceful resolution. And not alone either. The idea is joining others in going up the down staircase. In this way, the record contains a political undercurrent. To me, it’s a warning sign, signaling the death of isolationism. If we can persevere as a collective, we can turn things around before it’s too late. I’m interested in that.” And persevering is exactly what Islands seems to be doing.

(Here’s a bio I wrote about myself in the third person, even quoting myself, cause that’s what these things almost always are anyway) “It only took me 20 years of releasing music, but I’ve finally grown comfortable in my own artistic skin to release under my actual name.” Menno Versteeg was born on the floor of a stone house in a one street town with a working mill. “My mother was a visual artist and my father was an environmentalist, so yeah of course they gave me a strange name that was a perfect target for the Cody’s and Corey’s that used to kick my ass in middle school.” When he turned 13 he begged his parents to let him change his name to Cody or Corey and they told him to go ahead, if that's what he really wanted to do. “I showed up at school the next day and told everyone I was now going to be called Cody. That didn’t go over well with Cody or Corey, so one more bloody nose later, I decided just to toughen up and learn to take a scrap with a smile.” And as they tend to do, these petty differences resolved themselves with time and the commonalities emerged. The music of John Prine, Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline. Summer jobs cutting grass or moving piles of rocks, the value of a hard day's work and a self-reliance that nobody’s going to do it for you. Weekends spent swimming in the river, throwing rocks at the train or getting high under the bridge reading Far Side comics. Soon came Shell Silverstein and acid, then Vonnegut and and teaching himself to play the guitar from mix tapes of The Modern Lovers, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, and Operation Ivy. Then came the bands. “There was nowhere to play except the Legion, and we’d organize everything ourselves. All-Ages shows for $5 with 10 bands and most and the audience played in at least two of them. They always ended early, busted by the cops after someone threw up on an adult or a fight broke out.” These teenage scenes never last long, the kids grow up and move away, or stay and grow roots. Menno moved to Montreal to go to school, but the music followed and bad punk bands with even worse names ensued. Summer tours in old vans, all booked on computers in public libraries with greasy fingered, dog eared copies of “Book Your Own Fucking Life”. Shows in church basements and backyards, sleeping on floors in middle America often living day to day off the kindness of strangers. The many faces of America, so often contradicting themselves as well as each other. Each story was unique in its joys and tragedies. The beauty and the ugliness of the infinite grey area between black and white extremes was shaping Menno’s writing, but definitely was not paying the bills. Relocating to New York City and signing the only record deal he ever signed only made matters worse. “The guy who owned it was a total scumbag, although he did let me live on his kitchen floor in Brooklyn and teach me about drugs”, Menno recalls fondly. “He took every cent we had, and we decided to fold.” As romantic as it is being and young and stupid in New York City, the mania could not be sustained and Menno was urged return home to get a real job. “I really tried, I went to some job interviews and until one guy told me, - come back when you are ready to give up on music for real”. Mid-twenties and back to living at his parents basement and working whatever odd jobs could be found. Luckily his childhood neighbours down the street had grown up while he was away, all in their early 20’s now, they played every instrument better than he did, and were looking to get the hell out of that small town too. “We moved to Montreal, the city where 25 year olds go to retire. What better place to give it one last shot of playing music in a band for a living?” The band with his neighbors became Hollerado and like a blink, 13 years passed. The self proclaimed “World’s Greatest Opening Band”, toured everywhere that would have them. China, South America, Moscow and everywhere in between opening for literally anyone who asked. Genre didn’t matter as they amazed and/or annoyed crowds waiting to see Gang of Four, Passion Pit, The Flaming Lips, Jack White, Sum 41, Snoop Dogg, the list goes on. Along the way Versteeg earned the title as “a four time Juno Loser”, as well as penning half dozen top 10 hits, and accidentally founding Royal Mountain records, the label that helped launch the carers of his friends in Pup, Alvvays and Orville Peck (among others). Hollerado’s final headline tour in 2019 had a commemorative patch which payed homage to the Apollo 13 Mission patch. As Versteeg’s dear friend, Hollerado guitarist, and musical life partner, Nixon Boyd explained. “We came close to the moon but never walked on it and we almost died in the process.” Then came the Anyway Gang, a band he founded with the sole purpose of playing a show at Massey Hall, the only venue in Toronto he had never played. The band consisting of Sam Roberts, Chris Murphy from Sloan and Tokyo Police Clubs’ David Monks, went to number one with their first single, but has yet to play Massey Hall. And then Mav Karlo. A moniker adopted in homage to Menno’s friend that had lost his life that year. A tough record of a tough time, the first EP, recorded alone, on a four track cassette machine, in a thirty dollar a night casino hotel in Reno, Nevada over Christmas 2019, delved into the humour found in darkness and the release found in madness. And from the darkness, the LP “Strangers Like Us” which documents his journey of coming to terms with his own bipolar disorder and addiction, and finding the light in oneself. A collaboration with producer Chris Coady, and Nixon Boyd that Exclaim called “an instant classic”. “There's nothing overwrought about this album; it's simple and safe, and this is why it's so effective. It makes no grandiose claims. The words focus on deeply idiosyncratic and lonely impressions, on microcosms gravitating around and within Versteeg, but they tap into something so deeply human that you see yourself in Versteeg's place. The tracks are like parables that, while telling Versteeg's stories, serve in turn as advice and as cautionary tales to listeners. Mourning a city lost, hoping for a safe individual and collective future, hoping for a stable mind, for bravery, the album speaks to a desire we all have: to be okay. He tells gritty stories — sometimes with a wily sense of humour, other times with grim realness — of a life deeply felt. Versteeg has stated that writing this album served a therapeutic function for him, but listening to it is also deeply healing. You're left feeling as though you're not the only one in pain, mired in confusion, or blinded by anger. Not so much a rallying cry as a reassuring hand on our shoulders, Strangers Like Us is a relatable and beautiful debut from Mav Karlo, artist of the people. After all, its title is effectively "us." And yet, ever the chameleon, Versteeg is ready for one last name change. And that’s to Menno Versteeg. “I finally think I’m ready to be me”. To tell the stories I want to tell without any expectations or filters or coloured lenses shaping my view. “Just my truth and some really easy chords.” -Menno Versteeg, Barry’s Bay, Ontario (2021)