Sin Fang

Much better…Summer Echoes, a new album from the Iceland pop singer of Seabear and Sin Fang Bous out now on Morr Music.
With a slightly changed name and a pack of Icelandic all-stars, Sindri Már Sigfússon returns to the hinterlands of wistful melodic pop. His Sin Fang project is now on its second outing, following the 2009 debut Clangour (under the Sin Fang Bous moniker), and follows, by a year, the Seabear breakout We Built a Fire, one of 2010's best, least-heralded albums.

The rest (it’s short)


“Always Everything”

Seabear’s Icelandic pop

I kind of forgot about this one but it came up last night on album shuffle and it’s a really nice CD. The singer is Sindri Már Sigfússon, who is also the main engine behind Sin Fang Bous. I went to see Sin Fang Bous last year, when the band was touring with Mum, and you can read about it here.



Seabear is quite similar to Sin Fang Bous, in terms of wispy melodies and dreamy harmonies, but arranged in a little bit more of an Americana style…with strings, for instance…and with a little less of that rocking kick to it. But really pretty.

Anyway, here’s “Lion-Faced Boy” from the album We Built a Fire, out at the end of the month on Morr Music.

Mum’s the word…

My review of the really wonderful Mum/Sin Fang Bous show I attended last Sunday is up now at Blurt.

"I have been thinking about this beautiful note, a note that we begin every show with," says Múm's co-founder Őrvar Póreyjarson Smárason as his seven-person band finishes setting up drums, keyboards, pedal boards, cellos, violins, guitars, two melodicas and one ukulele. "It's such a beautiful note. I can't stop thinking about it."

And then Iceland's long-running electro-pop band drifts into the ethereal opening to "Illuminated," into a note grows and wafts upward in breathless, scale-climbing "ooh ooh oohs." It's the kind of note you could, indeed, get lost in, and both the band and the audience is simultaneously transfixed by its startling purity, its soft dreamlike intensity.

Indeed, tonight's show is all about the jaw-dropping, sudden beauty of experimental pop. Múm, along with opener Sin Fang Bous, both traffic in gentle, delicately arranged pop songs, billowing with soft harmonies and given spine by hard, dance-floor-thudding rhythms. Both are from Iceland. Both have new records out on German electro-label Morr Music, and both surpass these records decisively in live performance.

More


Mum’s MySpace


Sin Fang Bous’ MySpace

Múm

Went to see two Icelandic electro pop bands on Sunday…absolutely blown away by Múm and also enjoyed Sin Fang Bous quite a lot. There will be a review later at Blurt, but for now, here’s Múm’s “Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know.”