Nick Diamonds
City of Quartz
MANQUE MUSIC
6/10
Throughout his time fronting the cult indie-pop bands The Unicorns and Islands, Nick Thorburn has showcased a strong penchant for melody across multiple disparate genres. Even the curio supergroup Mister Heavenly (with Man Man’s Honus Honus and Shins/Modest Mouse percussionist Joe Plummer) kept up a long tradition of Thorburn songs that wiggle their way into your ears without ever escaping. This melodic experimentation and charm is diminished somewhat for his second solo album under the Nick Diamonds moniker. City of Quartz, like the 2011 Bandcamp release I Am an Attic before it, is a set of nocturnal synth-rock jams for the lonesome and dejected. The dour synthscapes heard on Thorburn’s soundtrack for the hit podcast Serial occasionally surface, but most of these tracks slot nicely into the weightless and ruminative pop heard on previous creations. The best examples often employ the best practices of electronica and fuse it with Thorburn’s usual indie-pop craftiness. It’s not bad, but we’ve heard it all before.
