Fuse yourself into the musical culture of countries potentially getting a visit from permanently hungover music journalists. Feast your ears on Early Warning, a piece from Icelandic musician, not the curtain shop, Myrkvi. Their name derived from the darkness and fog provides a sense of mythological intrigue, as does this delightful album cover. Ten tracks and a half hour to showcase those tonally dense offerings, then. People have done less with more time at their disposal. A solo project from the lockdown days for Vio instrumentalist Magnús Thorlacius expands into something far greater than first expected – a hidden gem of soothing and welcoming tracks which display a firm understanding of the madness around them.
Rare it may be for artists to actively participate in and understand what goes on in the day-to-day lives of the ordinary, Myrkvi has a clear opportunity to strike through. People are insane, they cry. Early Warning serves as an exceptional opener and sheds light on their theory. Crammed full of instrumental excess, the slick layers from this spin-off solo project from Thorlacius are exceptional. Satisfaction in your own company is what matters most – and the slick basslines matched with steady percussion and pacing are what bring out the best in Early Warning. It carries on through the wonderful dedications of Lunatic, an ode to those around Thorlacius and, for listeners, they will no doubt identify those suffering the same mad fate of powering through life with little change in their day-to-day activities. Slower in tone but just as comfy calling out those “stuck inside a box”.
Myrkvi is not just dancing around those strangers in the night but tries to get intimate with Miserable People. They are the people like you. Early Warning maintains a soft and touching core without feeling the need to overreach its comments on those who find themselves compared to those within their lives. It is easier to feel superior when circumstances in the lives of others go unknown. Early Warning feels less like an acceptance of others and more like a desire to separate the self from ordinary experiences. Life is meant for the unreal, after all. Floaty brilliance toward the end of Hallucinations is hard not to love – right there is experience of deeper meaning unlocked. Myrkvi hopes listeners opposed to his thought process do not take it the wrong way, of course, as Self-Pity processes.
Melodic beauties like Overboard have a light-hearted appeal to them, a loved-up piece with slight slide guitar spots throughout it. Delicate and electronic in the form of a lighter Arctic Monkeys cover. Perhaps that is just brain rot from endless days spent listening to Baby I’m Yours. Either way, this piece from Myrkvi is a dark horse for the year in music – a delightful experience which has an electric and acoustic blur to it, a sway with the beat and a motion pointing toward uplifting specific spirits. Latter tracks slip into simpler tones and hope to find pleasure in simplicity, as Beaches does. Simpler forms in these latter parts feel like an admission of guilt for not feeling like the lunatics previously mentioned. Early Warning is certainly one of the more interesting releases of the year – a fine piece of work from an artist whose projects were spawned by isolation.
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