Sigur ros: Valtari - Paul Buchanan: Mid Air

We are living in times of crisis and these two new releases betray the spirit of the times in their mood of withdrawal and melancholia. Both albums have been long in the offing. Sigur Ros last dates from four years back and Paul Buchanan and The Blue Nile didn't release anything new since High in 2004.

I immediately connected to Valtari's strangely melancholy atmosphere. It's a very contemplative album, suffused with an autumnal, post-apocalyptic glow. In a way, the music feels almost liturgical. I'm reminded of Saramago's wonderful Stone Raft in which a group of people traverses the Iberian peninsula on foot after it has dissociated itself from the European mainland. The small band is suffused with a state of grace, the sheer gratefulness of being alive in this weirdest of worlds, and yet there is also a dark undercurrent that speaks of something lost for good, of inadequacy and imperfection. That, for me, captures Valtari's expansive feel, supported by interminable lines on synths and strings, Jonsi's luminous falsetto and the occasional children choir.   

Whilst Sigur Ros' music evokes the vast expanses of a primeval landscape, Paul Buchanan withdraws with us to the late night intimacy of his own studio, with only a piano and a simple synth as companions. Mid Air is composed of fourteen short and simple ballads, wrapped in the most discrete accompaniment. Although the album has since its recent release met with rapturous response, I am personally less convinced. I'll take a Blue Nile album any time. Buchanan knows hows to create and sustain a mood with his wonderful, soulful voice. Taken individually, the songs are nice enough. But stringing fourteen of them together makes the album tilt towards the dull side of simplicity. As all songs are cut from the same cloth, there is very little contrast: same slow tempo and humdrum rhythm throughout, hardly any sense of development, and after a while the accompaniment becomes rather monochrome (not a nice piano he is playing on, or it's badly recorded). So, likely it's an album that has to be savoured in small dosages, two, three songs at a time. Time will tell whether I'll warm to it.