Icelandic music makes me want to go to Iceland. It must be a
landscape of endless ice castles and sparkling sunlight. Around
every corner is some mythic beauty that causes you to weep on
your knees for the ruined fate of our species. They know with a
certainty that the world is beautiful and we are only getting in the
way of this. Blindfold wraps this ethereal image in pop music and
sends it running over an endless field of compositions that fill the
entire room with their sound.
This is a rich, layered, spectral and occasionally melancholy pop
music that makes me smile and cry at the same time. I am a
sucker for reverb and the production value on this record sets the
level just right, neither blurring out the structure or letting you back
down out of the clouds for too long. It is deft and classy
arrangement showing a long familiarity with the band and what
they're going for. I've spent some time looking for production credits
out there on the tubes and I can't find any. If you know who
produced this, I'd love to hear from you.
There is an element that I find lacking in a lot of music that I get in
spades here. Dynamic range. I like the big, swelling crescendos,
the long build up and the feeling like a wave of music just took your
feet out from underneath you. Quiet moments in the record where
all the clouds part and you can watch a single bird fly across the
sunlight. Loud, angry thrashing guitars that threaten to break down
the walls of your mind. I like range and Blindfold has delivered it to
me.
Caffeine and Sleeping Pills is my favorite track so far, though I think
that had more to do with my intimate familiarity with that particular
sense of surreality than anything else. They do a great job lyrically
and tonally bringing me to those horrible and glorious 5 AM
moments where you don't know if it's more coffee or more drugs
that you really want.
I am an admitted fan of music that sounds like its name. Their
songs are descriptive tone poems that are drawing out a long night
spent watching the river flow by and wondering why you haven't
slept in a week. There is a constant sense of the distant horizon
always beckoning as an escape from whatever nightmare has you
in its clutches and you want to go there. It is potential, it is potent
and it is persistent. It is worth listening to, preferably alone during
that mysterious hour of 4 AM, watching mists and drinking
something unbelievably alcoholic.
Review by: Eriq Nelson
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