Musical Musings

Við og Við by Icelandic singer Ólöf Arnalds is my current listen-to-on-repeat album. Given my obsession with appreciation for singers who sing in a Scandinavian language, I came across Miss Arnalds’ tunes while listening to Björk guest-DJ a set on NPR. Björk kept mentioning her fellow Icelander’s amazing sense of chord structure, and I think that “Náttsöngur” gets that point across pretty well. Her sense of melody too. And arrangement. 

Sometimes it feels like I’ve been on a years-long quest for a certain kind of ambient that doesn’t exist, or at least that I haven’t yet found. Black Swan came pretty damn close with their 2010 debut Black Swan in Eight Movements, which was in fact one of my favorite albums of that year. But, they’re all I really know that fits into this category I’ve never been able to truly discover or describe, a weird line between ambient and drone. Behold the next contender: The Caretaker, a project by electronic musician James Kirby. His newest album An Empty Bliss Beyond this World takes a fascinating approach to the genre. He took a bunch of old-timey vinyl ballroom singles and in a way un-mastered them by adding tons of reverb, emphasizing the lows, looping bits, and even amplifying the characteristic cracks and pops of old records. The result is astonishingly beautiful: dance music that has been so manipulated it sounds and functions like ambient. Listen to “The Sublime Is Disappointingly Elusive.” 

I know I’m pretty late on this, but The Format’s Dog Problems is a record everyone should hear. I’ve been listening to Fun for a while now and always assumed that frontman Nate Ruess’s old band would be all indie-pop, no over-the-top-instrumentation, but boy was I wrong. On this record more than Fun’s 2009 debut Aim and Ignite, the band makes much better use of grand instrumentation to function for more than just, well, fun. On the surface, Dog Problems might sound like a bunch of upbeat pop songs, but beneath that is a crushing album about a devastating breakup. Try this: listen to the title track above, then read the lyrics. Or the reverse order, you’ll be just as surprised.

When you get down to it, I’m really just a sucker for female vocalists and eccentric, tight instrumentation. Check out “In the Beginning” by My Brightest Diamond. 

Most Scandinavian singers tend to avoid singing in their native language (like Swedish, Icelandic, and Danish). Sigur Rós even made up their own language to avoid singing in Icelandic. You can’t blame them, Scandinavian languages are full of guttural, mouthful-of-bread sounds. Although it’s the only non-English song from their eponymous debut, “Herfra Hvor Vi Står” by Danish duo Quadron is easily the most beautiful. The delivery of the voiced dental fricative makes my spine tingle. Thanks to teamsweeting for getting a translation. 

My earliest memory of Skidmore’s math rock outfit Slim Charles involves drunkenly trying to dance to their off-beat grooves (see “Words”) at a bar (or was it Falstaff’s?) well over a year ago. I remember heckling the bandmates for recordings, but couldn’t get anything more than cell phone quality videos recorded at said bars. Now, my dream has finally come true: their EP, Versus Fatso Jr., has been masterfully recorded and released. Listen to “Triangulate” above, then download the EP here. Some of the best use of distortion I’ve heard in math rock in a while.

Things noticed

This portion of “In California” from Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me occurs exactly one hour into the two-hour album. Doubtful it’s a coincidence that she sings: is it only timing that has made it such a dark hour, only ever chiming out, “cuckoo”?  —and shortly afterwards mimics the chiming of a cuckoo clock. Touché, Miss Newsom.

Dirty Projectors and Björk: a match made in heaven. Their 2010 collaborative EP, Mount Wittenberg Orca, was inspired by a hike that Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman took up that mountain, where she could see a pod of whales in the Pacific below. The main draw on this album is the singing—besides that there are only occasional guitar plucks and receded bass lines. That being said, the vocals come in three different forms: Björk as the mother whale, a trio of girls (Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian, and Haley Dekle) as the kid whales, and Dave Longstreth as a human (likely from the point of view of Amber on her hike). Complicated! But it works surprisingly well on this set of seven songs that hover around two to three minutes, quite light fare for both Björk and DPs.

The first six songs each stick to a single perspective, either the human by himself or the whales by themselves. Even in the first half of the album the lyrical content remains separated: the whales sing about swimming and ocean life, Dave sings a love song. But in the fifth track, an angry mother whale laments the treatment of her species by humans (Come into my home; murder my family and leave me alone…Until the sea is silent and deadly quiet). The human apologetically responds in the next song (I think I understand why you hate me, for what I’ve done, for what I haven’t done). In the final song, “All We Are” (listen above), the two species are finally brought together. After at first alternating stanzas (followed by a gorgeous crescendo), they all come together in one of the most beautiful passages I’ve heard all year:

We looked out across the long horizon. We looked in each other’s eyes and realized that we are only one. Through a moment we could glimpse an infinity, and through an infinity we could see: all in all is all we are.

Read more about the album and its inception, as well as buy a copy here.