Ólafur Arnalds is a young Icelandic musician whose work defines "architectural," as bulky strings are built around skeletal frameworks of piano, sometimes with sparse electronic loops for detail. He has a strong ear for proportion and balance, as if a single misplaced sound could trigger a collapse. At worst, his music can feel conservative and utilitarian, or overly cautious. There's a thin line between having an indelible personal stamp and charting by numbers. But at best, Arnalds' lucid forms and themes produce an agreeable opulence.
Before he was playing indie chamber music on tour with Sigur Rós, Arnalds played drums in hardcore bands with names like Fighting Shit. It is tempting to try and exhume some vestige of hardcore from his music, but that's a dead end. Arnalds' latest LP, with its almost hilariously generic post-rock title (the darkness, the ellipses, the vaguely heraldic voice!), is soft in every conceivable way: It's melodic, sensitive, rhythmically subdued. The most you can say is that a few tracks feature very prominent climaxes with laidback rock percussion, at which times the starry nocturnes flood with daylight. The occasional live drums, shimmering synths, and celestial vocal harmonies allow more force than usual into Arnalds' music, and it's a good look for him, even though he tends to be a dead ringer for Balmorhea, Peter Broderick, and Dirty Three at such moments.
The greater part of the album finds Arnalds up to his usual tricks, pouring honeyed strings back and forth over piano. His mildly irritating habit of launching his phrases in such rigid tandem they feel yoked together crops on "Þú Ert Jörðin", but the twist from natural to distorted tone in the piano line is beguiling. He has a fine knack for seductive yet tricky themes-- the circular, open-feeling phrases of "Loftið Verður Skyndilega Kalt" are especially good-- that live or die by their contexts. The piano and string duet "Kjurrt" is Arnalds as pure wallpaper, but "Undan Hulu", whose straightforward setting flirts with a similar fate, distinguishes itself with an uncommonly eloquent string part. The tempo shift on "Hægt, Kemur Ljósið" is delightful simply because it's so rare; the music more often has the intractable gait of a sleepwalker.
As Arnalds' boldest and most ambitious take on the form he's pursued so single-mindedly-- the robust yet ethereal, mid-tempo tearjerker-- ...And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness is a success for the composer, and for listeners who don't balk at a little unabashed pageantry. Now that he's perfected that voice, another album of the same would be redundant, so let's hope that next time, he'll try something new-- perhaps something freer and less varnished.
