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One-To-One Scale
Gareth Edwards’s ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’ ‘Rogue One’ fully and completely understands what it means to be a Star Wars movie. It means retreading familiar ground not with hesitation, fear, and blind adherence to form, but with bold surety and…
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New Star Wars Is Fucking Garbage
WARNING! STAR WARS: EPISODE VII SPOILERS IN THIS POST! SCROLL FASTER, REFRESH YOUR PAGE OR STAB YOURSELF IN THE EYES WITH WHATEVER YOU CAN GRAB IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ THIS! Let me just start this post by stating the obvious:…
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Uh, No
Man, fuck Darren Aronofsky. Fuck his weak, hacky, hammy, pretentious, melodramatic, student-filmmaking-with-a-budget shit. I’ve always been mystified as to how it is he gets people to buy his overdone soap opera crap as serious film, but I’m confident ‘Noah’–a retelling of the…
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Put Yourself Into A Horse
For all of Iceland’s cinematic history, a tendency has prevailed to portray rural Iceland as a base and hateful place, inhabited by a crude, simple folk of few words and many vices, a place whose stark natural beauty is tempered only by…
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What Did I Just Watch?
This film is odd. I can’t decide what it’s supposed to be. Is it some sort of ad for Life Magazine? Because there’s certainly enough unabashed celebration of the already very self-important publication in `The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty,’ and ads…
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Being Him Just Wasn’t That Much Fun
So it’s been ten years since Elliott Smith died. By the time this article goes to print, there will probablybe a host of other pieces marking this rather infamous anniversary on blogs and music websites, as well as in magazines, podcasts and…
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Life In A Northern Town: Dagur Kári’s ‘Nói Albínói’
Claustrophobia. It’s everywhere in ‘Nói Albínói.’ It’s in the flailing arms of the titular character tossing rocks into the ocean, wishing he could throw himself away. It’s in the frustrated desperation of his father, suffocating Nói with his misguided attempts to help…
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Here We Go Again: Marteinn Thorsson’s ‘XL’
“How typical,” mumbles Leifur, ‘XL’s protagonist as he attends a performance art exhibition, only to be shushed by his vacuous date. “What do you mean?” she asks as the lead man in the piece produces a man-sized stuffed pink bear, which he…
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Rock Me, Sexy Jesus
Let me just say this right off the bat: it’s not Bryan Ferry’s fault he’s old, and I am in no way insinuating he should retire. He’s made a half-dozen terrific albums since Roxy Music called it a day in the mid-eighties…
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Song For Wendy: Meeting Point
I’m not quite sure, but I think this is a failed attempt to make folk songs out of various poems. I’m sorry, I know it’s wrong to second-guess musicians’ intent when they set about making albums, but I’m just trying to describe…
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Baggalútur: Áfram Ísland!
Isn’t there some other album called this? Now, the music here is basically irrelevant, so I’m pretty much just gonna talk about the lyrics. While this may seem counterproductive, as this is an English-language publication and the lyrics are all in Icelandic,…
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HAMLETTE HOK: VÍKARTINDUR
I always feel insecure when I try to review music like this (probably because Ben Frost yelled at me about it when I was nineteen), but I just fail to see the point of improvised experimental noise if it’s just random clattering…
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NOLO: Nology
Treading a curious line between meticulously soundscaped and haphazardly simple, Nology is a slightly daft adventure in post-modern musicianship, but its daftness certainly doesn’t prevent it from carving some beautifully austere pop hooks. ‘Yorkshire’ encapsulates everything that’s still bearable about indie condensed…
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Stealing Mountains
For three months, Mike Lindsey has lived alone in a cottage in northeast Iceland. Having gained some notoriety as a founding member of British alt-folk gang Tunng, he decided last March that what he really wanted to do was to go to…
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The Foreigner’s Prerogative
So who the frak is Jóhann Jóhannsson? He’s an accomplished Icelandic musician, a self-taught composer with seven solo albums and seven movie soundtracks under his belt, as well as having been a member of several successful Icelandic bands, including HAM, Lhooq, Unun,…
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Steve Sampling: The Optimist
Steve Sampling’s trip-tastic journey through his magical adventure world of drum patterns, random delay effects, airtight compression and—you guessed it—oodles upon oodles of samples is light, accessible and enjoyable, which isn’t necessarily a good thing, mind you. The album gets a bit…
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Nico Muhly: I Drink The Air Before Me
IDTABM reaches far and wide in its attempts to balance playful flute frolics and dark, sombre horns, and Muhly has created a piece that, while ostensibly a soundtrack to a visual work, also functions fairly well as a darkly atmospheric work in…
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Taming The Animal
Reykjavík to New York transplant Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, or Shoplifter as she’s known outside of Iceland, has been making quite a dent in recent years with her designs, including a huge window display in New York’s Museum Of Modern Art. Her most recent…
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UNTITLED MUSIC COLUMN
When I turned thirteen, and consequently started smelling like shit, my mom decided to break it to me in an interesting way. Rather than confront me with the mind-bending horrors of puberty, she gently told me that although she wasn’t bothered by…
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Bob And Sindri Go Músíktilraunir!
Every year, Músíktilraunir (“Music Experiments”) are held to locate and reward the most innovative undiscovered bands in Iceland. To fully document this exciting and unique display of youthful talent and exuberance, the Grapevine sent two of its most refined and highbrow cultural…
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Come All Ye Faithful, But Other People Can Totally Come If They Want To
Not all artists are assholes. Some, in fact, can be quite friendly. While the Hallgrímskirkja Friends Of The Arts Society may not befriend artists, they are, as their name suggests, great fans of art, so an appreciation of artists would be implied;…
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RMM – Your Schedule
Reykjavik Music Mess is an independent music festival in downtown Reykjavik, with shows at Nasa, The Nordic House and Sódóma Reykjavík. It is held for the first time from the 15th to 17th of April. We have invited international acts such as…
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Lower Dens: Two-Hand Movement
Sweeping through its thirty-odd minutes in a laid-back haze of introspective nihilism, ‘Two-Hand Movement’ is a rainy afternoon of twinkling guitars, confidently plodding rhythm and breathless, barely audible vocals. The euphoric ‘Truss Me’ is particularly potent, its calm defeatism so narcotic you…
