You start a band with your mates. Your band has umpteen members with instruments such as violin, harp and washboard. Then someone asks you what your band sounds like. And the first words you’ll say are “oh, a bit like Arcade Fire.”…

Thanks, you bastards. I was having a zonked-out Sunday there, minding my own business, before your proggy, introspective tunes made my hangover come up again. This is not, of course, a bad thing: the first track on your wily debut album, ‘Anything…

Am I the only one not entertained by this stupid gypsy-folk shtick? This ridiculous bullshit pretty much writes itself and should by no means consider itself music, but if it’s comedy you’re looking for, and you find yourself entertained by adequately-rhymed tales…

Why do people try to cover Kate Bush? Eivör fails as hard as Futureheads and Placebo ever did, but we’ll disregard that for the purposes of this review, because other than that, the album’s pretty good. Eivör wisely leaves the hard work…

Didn’t know much about Svarthöfði (Icelandic for Darth Vader) but I took a punt on these guys through Gogoyoko. I wish I hadn’t bothered. They may call themselves punk, but I thought that there should be some form of energy for a…

Minimalistic vocal-centric lo-fi is a tough game to play. It’s not that it’s so hit or miss; it’s that a lot of the time the listeners finds themselves questioning if it sounds shitty because of the shitty recording job or it’s been…

With all the rock being recorded in Iceland, you’d think we’d have found one producer who can make it sound the way it should. The fact that FAMR apparently sought foreign talent for their production needs just makes it all the more…

If you’ve ever witnessed Ólafur Arnalds perform, you know that his music has an almost magical aura. I recently saw a hall with hundreds of metal-festival attendees hushing each other fervently while devotedly taking in Ólafur and his string quartet. It was…

There was a point somewhere about five years ago when post-rock went from still being something, kinda, to becoming full-on cock-rock that overcompensating dudebros could justifiably cry over. Probably due to the fact that the super emotionally-charged song structures are played on…

To my knowledge, the only notable thing to have come from Dalvík recently is Friðrik Ómar, a poisoned pop dwarf whose music is the equivalent of a dozen Care Bears vomiting onto the face of a small child. But for every Ying,…

A while ago I reviewed MTSN´s debut EP and gave it a cautious thumbs up for its scuzzy rock sound. Now I’m taking it all back. I had really high hopes with this album, but after listening to it, it becomes obvious…

A lot of the acoustic based releases making the rounds this year seem to be following the same tired 60s and 70s template of Neil young/Nick Drake/Van Morrison. The end result of this is that they all seem to have the atmosphere…

Everybody and their mother are talking about atmospheric black metal these days. Sure enough, there’s a tidal wave of bands trying to get their piece of the pie, by throwing in some ambient keyboard noises and dragging their otherwise uneventful songs out.…