Back in October 2003, just a month before many had their political hearts ripped out of their chest Temple of Doom-style, everyone fell in love with The Unicorns, a delightful indie-pop group from Montreal, Canada. Everything on their lone LP, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, was humorous and immediate—the sound of teenage science nerds joyfully spazzing out in their parents' basement. Since then, The Unicorns have disbanded and become Islands, a collective of grown-up science nerds noodling in well-stocked practice spaces and respectable studios.

Originally the project of founding Unicorn Nicholas Thorburn, Islands grew in bandmembers and released the genre-exploring Return to the Sea in 2005, a record that dabbled in calypso and hip-hop but retained The Unicorns' smart-dude-in-the-class posture. Their latest, the cohesive Arm's Way (Anti, May 20), finds vocalist Thorburn with more mature lyrics and his band settling into its musical skin—all to less-than-thrilling results.

Turning its back on the seat-of-its-pants pop structures of his previous band, Thorburn and co. meticulously arrange the material on Arm's Way. Adding in orchestral touches this time around, every cello sound, guitar strum, and vocal yelp is arranged with precision. There's something to be said for this Graceland-like organizational expertise, but it eliminates the album's immediacy and divorces it from its ragged indie-rock roots. As a result, Arm's Way sounds much closer to the work of The Decemberists or Of Montreal than, say, Pavement.

But what Arm's Way lacks in immediacy it makes up for in its lyrical content. The record proves Thorburn as gifted a wordsmith as Arcade Fire's Win Butler or the aforementioned Colin Meloy, but without those singers' didactic or I've-read-more-than-you tendencies. On album standout "Kids Don't Know Shit," Thorburn offers a bleak outlook for today's youth over his band's buoyant pop: "Kids don't know shit / Everything they've learned is wrong ... Kids don't know it / but everything they've touched is gone." "Life In Jail" and "I Feel Evil Creeping In" explore similarly dark material with the same degree of catchiness. Here, the lyrics lift up a record that is chock-full of thought, but too often sapped of energy.