Islands, Blueprint, Subtitle | The Icon, Buffalo

How could my return home to Buffalo for Thanksgiving get any better than a delicious turkey dinner? How about Islands hitting the Buffalo Icon the day before???

Luke, Jason, Pam and I entered the Icon around 8:15ish, and I was half expecting the show to have already started, but I also had read that Islands's shows had been running late. I was very surprised at the extremely sparse crowd that showed up. The Icon usually packs them in, but with all the college kids back home and being the night before Thanksgiving, the draw was surprisingly very small high school scenesters. I knew the first two acts were rapppers, so I was intrigued to see how they would react to it.

Subtitle stepped up first, an exteremely tall man with a Southern accent, who talks and raps extremely fast to beats played off his iPod. While his stories were funny, ranging from getting gear stolen his previous trip to Buffalo and trying to stop Islands frontman Nick Diamonds from having sex in the back of a car full of gangsters, his beats were simple and muffled, and his raps didn't seem to flow to well with them. I'm curious to hear him on record, I feel the iPod beats don't do him justice. He didn't get too much response from the crowd besides the laughs at his ridiculous tales.

Blueprint and DJ Rare Groove jumped on stage almost immediately thereafter, and had wonderful stage presence. His recent work with RJD2 as Soul Position, Things Go Better with RJ and Al, is anti-bling, very funny and thoughtful. He pulled a few songs from this including "I Need My Minutes," "Blame It on the Jager," and "No Gimmicks." Maybe it was the fact that he had a real DJ and more volume output, but Blueprint comanded the stage, got the kids into it and had fun.

After waiting a very long time, Islands took the stage, clad in white, and two members carrying a drum case onto the stage. Only a drum was not in it, but Nick Diamonds was as he jumped out, also in white and white facepaint, and launched into "Humans". The band played a majority of its debut, Return to the Sea, including "Bucky Little Wing," "Tsuxiit," "Rough Gem," "Volcanoes," and "Where There's A Will, There's A Whalebone," which featured Subtitle coming back and doing his rap and Bus Driver's from the crowd. The band also included several new songs, "Pieces of You," "The Arm," and others . These were quite good, some of them with some alt-country influence, and some of them a bit heavier and rock oriented than the debut. It's good to know the loss of J'AimeTambeur isn't slowing these guys down.

The bands live show is quite wonderful, with Diamonds singing all over the stage and crowd when he isn't on guitar or keyboards. Alex and Sebastian Chow are great on the violins and percussion, jumping all over the stage and create a wonderful dynamic to the music. Islands encored with "Don't Call Me Whitney, Bobby" and ended with a wonderful version of "Swans (Life After Death)" putting all their effort into the last song of their tour, and Diamonds leaving the stage with his guitar osciallating feedback from his amp. I was quite surprised by the great show Islands put on, and their new material is promising. Hopefully they won't fall to the same fate as The Unicorns, and we'll stick around long enough to comeback to Buffalo and play to a full crowd.