The upper level of the building served as the band's mixing and control room, whilst the lower level was dedicated to recording space.
According to the man himself - "When I sing songs in Hopelandic, I am singing the same words, the same sounds. It's more similar to English than Icelandic in many ways, but you can't translate it.
This is just another way the band took to transforming and maximising the creative process, thus adding to the deep collage of ghostly, hollow and heart-rendering sounds so prominent on the album.
Despite this development, when it came to recording the tracks onto the album themselves, the band was already exasperated with the tunes.
There was also pressure from the industry itself, leaving the album with an imprint that seemed elegant, yet blank and distant. In other words, polarised the band's fan base to a degree, with many claiming the work to be a new frontier in the genre whilst others felt the album failed to live up to its staggering predecessor.
In its first week of release, the album sold 30, copies and ranked 27th on the US Billboard Music from the album has since been utilised across a wide range of mediums; Ubisoft's Prince of Persia , BBC's Planet Earth series and the sports show, Match of the Day , to name just a few. Drawing from the gains of their fourth album Takk In this album, one can hear a definitive folksy influence; orthodox guitar riffs, steady rhythms and playful acoustics.
Originally, the album was supposed to have English lyrics, though the band later decided that their native Icelandic was more natural. This meant that certain songs needed to be changed after recording, while others had to be rewritten from scratch. Music from the album has seeped heavily into pop culture; tracks have been utilised in films such as Danny Boyle's Hours and Neil Jordan's Ondine , as well as scoring the BBC's run-up to the Olympic games.
Almost universally, the album was critically acclaimed, with Rolling Stone declaring it the " most worldly, varied and considerate, the usual ice-floe speed of their rock impetuous. After the touring of the album was complete - footage from the tour can be seen in the film and accompanying live album Inni - the band returned to the studio, but found what they recorded to be unsatisfactory.
From there, the band decided to go on hiatus in a bid to pursue other projects. And that's just it; the entire album is an atmospheric soundscape, a delicate compilation of subtle piano chords, ethereal string work and moody vocalisations, all dispersed with the odd, illuminating crescendo. Arguably though, this is Valtari's greatest weakness; that the crescendos are rare, as though the band could not sincerely commit to pushing the glaring genre boundaries this album seems so confined to.
None of them know what the others are doing, so it could be interesting. Perhaps most resounding in Valtari is the hauntingly beautiful concept of 'closure'.
In that light, it would be the last album with their keyboard player and founding member. In that spirit, Kveikur sounds like neither the pop nor the ambient stylings previously explored by the band. Now fitting neatly into a 3-man band setup, Kjartan's keyboards have been replaced with a grittier, heavier sound - cascading drum sets, structured baselines, rumbling distortion. One gets the impression listening to this album that, at the time of writing and recording, the remaining band members were themselves in a transition, asking questions and challenging their own musical authority.
Though only available at certain dispensaries in California and for US nationwide delivery from the Lord Jones website , the gumdrops themselves take inspiration from the flavoursome, wild berries of Iceland.
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Its fantastical subject had given a mawkish reality to something that seemed transcendent. The magic returned. I forewent meaning in favour of immersion and imagination.
Neither do its eight tracks, which are divided into two halves: the radiant optimism and uplifting melodies of the front-end, and the darker, heavier stretches of the back-end.
But, unlike that fantasy dialect, Hopelandic has no syntax, grammar, or definitions. A blank slate for the listener to conjure their own significance. This concept extends to the packaging for. Devoid of liner notes, the booklet comprises ghostly blank pages, encouraging fans to fill the whitewashed contents with their own lyrics and interpretations.
This exercise shows firsthand how trivial and distracting these labels are, when the focus should be on the elegantly arranged, cinematic songs, and the experience of listening to them. Its funereal pace and bleak yet beautiful tone conveys that sense of fatal permanence. The album will be called Med sud i eyrum vid spilum endalaust.
Gobbledigook, the lead single, is available now as a free download , as is the music video. It features lots of handclaps, guitar strums, and frolicking naked people.
And it's definitely not safe for work.
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