synaesthetemusicreview

[synaesthetemusicreview]

Ólafur Arnalds - “some kind of peace”: The album equivalent of an itchy clothes label

This album feels like an uncomfortable label in my clothes. 

Loom - this kind of slightly stuttering main synth, with this noisy texture applied so the notes would feel like rough paper, or fine grit sandpaper. For me, I really struggle to fully sink into the flow of an ambient album with a collection of such short samples. Or maybe not that the samples are short, each is so defined and distanced from each other that it’s like the melody isn’t given the chance to flow, it gives the winding up feeling of watching/listening to something through dodgy wifi. The background “shh shh” also doesn’t move clockwise, linearly, or is even static, it feels like it’s going left and right in the exact same point. 

Woven - I have a lot of respect for this song, and I think the use of sampling helps. The singer spends enough time to allow the melody she’s singing to take the shape it needs to take, and through that Olafur is forced to apply the same treatment to his strings, leading to these really nice swooping layering of stings over each other at the end. 

Spiral - to me it lives up to its name at the start, even if it’s more of a descending zig-zag spiral than a strict curve. The stripped back strings at the start feel so delicate and soft, concentrating mostly on the lower cheeks and top lip. However, when the piano and extra instruments come in, it muddies the effect for me, especially by crowbarring an “optimistic” feel over the track. The track becomes so muddy and overloaded its movement is completely static. 

Still/Sound - Now normally bleepy boops with reverb are my jam, but something about this is off. The little rattles of bubbles on the left hand sided in the background add a nice layer, literally on a different plane than the other timbre in the track. It’s the way that when some of these notes ae supposed to harmonise together, something about their texture rubs each other the wrong way. The pitch is probably perfect, but there’s SOMETHING not quite right. The crackling background tones would be something I would love if they were front and centre in the track, they have a lovely geometric feel to them. However, their repetition, and placement with such low volume behind the other sounds just gives an endless crawling sensation that means you can’t concentrate on the rest of the song. 

Back to the Sky- WHY would you make your percussion samples sound like that? It’s got such a scratching back and forth motion that feels like it grips the voice (Jófríður Ákadóttir I think) and stops this very woody textured vocal performance being able to fulfil the motion it’s trying to. 

Zero- I think either Olafur has a piano with huge sentimental value he loves to use, or he goes way overboard on the key thonk noises to give the piano melodies a feeling of rusticness/authenticity. I can’t fault him for it, but for me it has a metronomic quality, but the extra “rustling” in the song I find vey hard to turn off from. The noise section is fine, but I find it very static (no pun intended). Things happen, but there’s no movement within, the sound itself is flat, even multiple tones building on each other and morphing are reduced to highly skippable noise.

New Grass - it’s edging close to the great feeling of strings moving in their own space and coalescing on the same wavelength (think Bjork- Joga as a successful example) but not quite there. 

The Bottom Line - This one is tricky, because it doesn’t do that much for my synaesthesia, but it still annoys me. It has these strings that are trying so hard to be soaring and taking so much time around each sample, but each tone comes off as arrogant. It’s incredibly basic strings embossed with extra sounds to frame it as “Wow! How beautiful and moving is this song?” without doing the work to prove it. It feels artificial. 

We Contain Multitudes - whatever.

Undone - I feel like Undone is a pretty good complier of many things wrong with the album. This album should be a simple and soothing ambient piece, to feel peace in being able to lose yourself completely in it. However, I feel like its need to be overblown ruins it for itself. This is more a general complaint than a synaesthesia one, but just because a track has a simple piano arpeggio, some slow strings and dome “deep” candid conversation does not unlock “beautiful” music. Whenever a track finds an interesting melody, some dipshit piano roll ending on a major note has to pop up, this album is not content to let you sit and think, and process the emotions you have. At every section it has to uplift at the end, convince you that this album is some kind of life changing experience and you’re a better person for having listened to it. Each percussion sample has been processed to feel extra soft, by dampening the intro and outro of each note. This makes it feel like each one is expanding out of its outlines with a fuzzy faded edge which makes them soft and bleed into spaces they don’t need to be as well as lacking solid rhythm.  Stop making every percussion sample feel like carpet.

It’s hard because there are lots of aspects of the album I like, it’s unarguably well produced (apart from the percussion I’d argue is overproduced) and thoughtful, but synaesthesia is an irrational player.