The Icelandic singer/songwriter Ólöf Arnalds isn't well-known in America, but the few who warmed themselves to the glow of her quietly spellbinding 2007 album Við Og Við or witnessed one of her charmingly quirky live shows passed her around like a secret. Her snowflake-delicate folk songs are composed of one or two acoustic instruments, her high, trilling voice, and nothing else. She sings almost entirely in Icelandic, which casts its own peculiar spell-- there are no turns of phrase to puzzle over, nothing to separate from the serene whole. Her new album, Innundir Skinni, is fuller-sounding than Við Og Við, but its pleasures are just as elusive and profound. Like Joanna Newsom's Have One on Me, it is a rich and musically complex experience that evaporates into the ether if you let it. It is impossible not be charmed by Arnalds' music, but loving it takes focus.
Við Og Við was structured almost entirely around Arnald's finger-picked acoustic guitar, but Innundir Skinni includes a bustling menagerie of folk instruments, from the South American charango to the stroh violin, a thin, whiny horn-violin hybrid. None of them share the stage all at once, however; they creep in quietly, one by one, from the side, making little pinpricks in the songs' texture before gliding away. Arnalds seems to be freely borrowing what she loves about other cultures (Chinese music on "Vinkonur", fado on "Madrid", Celtic reels on "Jonathan") to create something indigenous only to herself. There are lots of lovely surprises as a result-- the little "too rah loo rah lay" chant on "Jonathan", the spaghetti-western horns that intrude on the group singalong "Vinur Minn"-- even if you have to lean in close to register them.
Innundir Skinni also includes Arnalds' first-ever English-language songs. "Crazy Car" is a disarming plea to a musician friend not to seek her fortunes in America-- "Don't go in the crazy car," Arnalds sings lightly, over and over again, to a melody that twirls like a child's mobile. "Surrender" is the dark inverse-- a hypnotic song that features Björk on moaning background vocals. The lyrics are incantatory and difficult to make out, but the floating phrases that surface ("I carry you/ I nurture you/ Give birth to you") and the circular melody worm their way under your skin nonetheless. Incidentally, this is what the title Innundir Skinni translates to loosely in English-- "under the skin"-- an apt description for Arnalds' gentle, peculiar and powerful music itself.
