Released September 20, 2011
5 / 10
Favorites
Love Love Love, Yellow Light
Least favorites
King and Lionheart, Mountain Sound, From Finner
The Icelandic alternative folk sextet led by lead vocalists Nanna and Ragnar rose to fame after winning their home country's battle-of-the-bands competition in 2010. Their debut album was an international success, built on a variety of instruments, including brass, accordion, glockenspiel (yes that's an instrument), melodica (that too), piano and guitar, as well as a hefty use of vocal harmonization. "My Head Is An Animal" combines folk sounds with bombastic effects, in an effort to read as an indie festival hymnal. The result is unsettling, taunting us to sing along at every turn, begging for the echoes of "la la la"s and "hey hey"s too ostentatiously. Many of the songs are stories of their own, with their own universe and not-so-subtle metaphors. Album opener Dirty Paws takes storytelling very literally, drawing the listener in with the line "And once there was an animal", along a slow build-up from a near acoustic start to a dense musical tapestry. The whole song tells the tale of World War 2, re-imagining the Axis as bees and the Allies as birds, dropping little hints along the way with allusions to the infamous 'Lebensraum' argument ("The sky wasn't big enough for them all") and a look at the trenches where soldiers have "dirty paws". Little Talks, the band's debut single that introduced them to the larger part of their audience, will probably remind you of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros' "Home", with its vocal dialogue and trumpets. Ragnar sounds comforting as Nanna plays the role of a widow struggling with the aftermath of her late husband's demise. The stripped parts of the song - including parts of the verses and the bridge -, in which the vocals shine through, are the stand-outs in an otherwise caricatural sound. Yet another example of a track thematically constructed around a story fantasy is Six Weeks. One of the better songs on the album, it's based on the life of Hugh Glass, an American Frontiersman who survived a fight with a grizzly bear. As a lot of its sisters do, the song grows to epic proportions, inexorably moving towards its festival-worthy pinnacle - through the type of arduous crescendo the band excels in. This time around the ending refrain compliments the rest of the track well, but such is not the case in many instances on "My Head Is An Animal". When writing the record, the band threw anticipation out the window, choosing predictability for its warmth and safety - and ineluctably making for an unsurprising bunch. Mountain Sound is a particularly frustrating listen for me, as it led me to think there might be more beyond the first minute of the song, only to reach the conclusion that Of Monsters and Men is as risk-averse as they come. The song lives for a spot on a paid advertisement, an audible synthesis of the indie folk repertoire, full of clapping and "la la la"s - the genre equivalent of DJs' cringe-inducing "Put your hands ups!"s. Even more treacherous is Slow And Steady, a radical change of pace that opens with eerie background noises. Nanna's voice navigates a sonic fog, with resonating droplets and slow and steady - of course - percussions. It all makes for quite a decent track overall if not for the fact that the band couldn't help themselves from ending it with "oh oh oh"s (not "la la la"s so it's different) throwing us in festival mode again. Nothing compares to From Finner though. The track has BOTH "la la la"s and "hey hey"s; the envy of all its siblings is palpable. I could stop here but there's more. Your Bones congruent marching sound that matches its story of a nomadic tribe also falls prey to the festival blackhole. Yep, you guessed it, "la la la"s! By the time you reach Lakehouse you just KNOW the song won't escape its fate. It builds up - yes! almost oddly satisfying to know you're right -, come on... a little more... OK we have rolling drums, I said rolling drums on deck! Clapping now, clapping!! Annnnnnd, "la la la"s made it to homebase, we're clear... Nevertheless, to be fair, it's not all that bad on "My Head Is An Animal". Love Love Love provides a nice cooldown after Six Weeks in a surprising turn of events. A simple melody, Nanna's vocals in charge and a welcome carefully-timed pause about halfway through the song outweigh the puzzling bells that creep up all of a sudden. Nanna's voice almost cracks in the most emotional delivery of the record, positioning herself as someone that can't reciprocate a friend's love for her. Yellow Light cleverly ends the album with its most intricate melodic line, re-iterating the dialogue effect of Nanna and Ragnar exchanging lines from *Little Talks*, the latter comforting the former ("Just grab a hold of my hand", "Just follow my yellow light"). Despite being crafted around the image of a lantern fish that lures its prey with soothing light before closing the trap on its unsuspecting game, it curiously doesn't close the record on an ominous note. An instrumental takes over the better half of the track, transforming the tragic conclusion into a warm mystery. Yet, the biggest mystery of them all is: how did the band manage to make those damn "la la la"s sound so good on the album's ultimate denouement?
Favorite lyrics
"The books that I keep by my bed Are full of your stories That I drew up from a little dream of mine A little nightmare of yours"
Sloom
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