A Sleep & A Forgetting by Islands

It's something of a triumph for Thorburn, to match his most emotionally devastating material yet with music that's so close-sounding and unassumingly, unabashedly pretty.

It’s an inspired look at the grieving human heart. And one of the best Islands records so far, to boot.

While A Sleep & A Forgetting is a bold new statement for the band, the album occasionally treads on the mundane level, due to its similarly-orchestrated tracks.

That infectious, childlike zeal was so integral to the first part of their career that A Sleep is jarringly unfamiliar at first.

It's just that, well, it gets a bit boring, a bit sleepy, and altogether, it's a bit forgettable.