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The addition of vocals to several cuts (including LaValle's first foray into singing on three songs) greatly expands The Album Leaf's palette as well -- just about the only complaint you could level at the previous works might have been the limited instrumentation. In particular, Black Heart's Pall Jenkins'vocals really blur the line between ambient electronic music and melancholic post-rock, the former dominating earlier Album Leaf efforts.
By accepting the open invitation of good friends and recording in these unique, polar-opposite elements (can you figuratively get any further from Iceland than San Diego?), LaValle did indeed find a A Safe Place.
The Album Leaf play the Neighborhood Theatre Friday, with The Movies opening. Tickets are $10, and doors for the 8pm show open at 7pm.
Icelands Múm keep it cool, calm, and collected
By Timothy C. Davis
Like many of their countrymen -- Sigur Rs, Gus Gus, and The Leaves, to name a few -- the band Múm (25-year-old Gunnar Tynes, 27-year-old Örvar Smárason and 22-year-old Kristín Valtysdttir) are part of what has been dubbed the "Icelandic sound": equal parts stringed instruments, either minimal or double-speed percussion (or both), lots of electronic bleeps and blips, and breathy, delicate vocals that often function more as an additional instrument than anything else. These bands often use a sort of bastardized Icelandic/ American hybrid, "la-la" style baby talk, or else a brand new language altogether (see Sigur Rs). Due to the symphonic sweep of the music, vocals are used mostly for their emotional textures and color tones, not to further a narrative.
"I do sing in English, but you don't understand my English," Valtysdttir says. "On this album everything is sung in English -- or my way of singing English."
Like many of their contemporaries, Múm are a band that transcends language barriers, relying instead on the emotional tug of war between digital and analog, male and female, musician and instrument, and performer and audience. Expertly manipulating tones and frequencies and tempos like a storyteller uses rhetorical devices, Múm manage to construct a musical language that often says more than mere words ever could.
Interestingly, Iceland is perhaps the only foreign country to make a real dent in the indie rock world, despite boasting an oeuvre almost completely done in a foreign tongue (Bjork aside). Sure, there are hipsters with Serge Gainsbourg records, and more than a few would-be Japanophiles with Melt Banana and Eastern Youth discs, but Icelandic bands dwarf their sales -- hey, record store clerks need make-out music too!
For our purposes, we're talking about music people actually listen to. And listening is what Múm is all about.
Indeed, it's hard to talk about Múm without dwelling on their nationality.
A country that exudes archetypal poles of fire and ice, Iceland's bands are usually reviewed using all manner of topographical metaphor. The music is described as glacial and polished, or else cool and calculated. However, make too many generalizations based on geo- and sociopolitical landmarks, and you're venturing very close to the same mindset that gave Seattle the "grunge" label a decade or so back. Sure, Múm's music contains nothing approaching the sunny jangle of The Beach Boys or The Byrds, nor does it contain the desolate urban intensity of Detroit's Stooges and MC5. However, Detroit also gave us The White Stripes, a band marinated in Southern blooze, and California is home to none other than Jimmy LaValle, who -- in his incarnation as The Album Leaf -- sells more than his share of records in...Iceland. Home may be where the heart is, goes the old saying, but must it be where the art is, too?
In Múm's case, yes and no. The band's latest release, Summer Make Good (FatCat), was recorded by pal Orri Jonson (from fellow Icelanders Slowblow), and mixed at Sigur Rs' own studio, a structure converted from a swimming pool a few years back. Summer Make Good was written and recorded in a remote lighthouse near an isolated town on a Southwestern Icelandic peninsula.
"We didn't want to go to a studio because we wanted the sound of an old empty house," Valtysdttir says. "We wanted the sounds that live in old houses to be on the record, and that's why we also wanted to record on tape -- you can capture (that sort of thing). It was a really, really windy place and the house made a lot of sounds ... It was a really suitable place for the album to be made. I was really thankful for the town to let us stay there."
Such unusual locales were a natural fit for the band's eclectic mix of melodica, glockenspiel, accordion, iBook, keyboards, trumpet, viola, violin, bowed musical saw, pump organ, Chinese harp, and banjo. Recorded equally on ProTools and one-inch analog tape, the combined musical effect is dizzying (a state of mind enhanced by Valtysdttir's helium-high falsetto), but suggests less the surrounding landscape than it does the extremes Icelandic musicians go to in an effort to record their music.