Pitchfork

This Danish quintet's first full-length release on Home Tapes is a full of dark and radiant songs that compete and unite at equal turns. The album opens with the peaceful, anemic bombast of "Sleep Tight", its winds and strings chugging through crashes of cymbals and bass. An ominous chorus of voices enforces a marching cadence, but the precision breaks midway for guitars and distant howls reminiscent of Animal Collective's Campfire Songs.

Incorporating so many instrument families into one sound is difficult, and Slaraffenland have some trouble with "Show Me the Way", which ineffectively plods and floats with punches of saxophone and trombone and flits of guitar and drum. At only two minutes it never quite lures us in, but it's the only track that doesn't. "The Run Up" is another softhearted interlude that coaxes the ear with soft harmonies and the powerful foundation of brass in low registers. "This One Will Kill Us" starts with a disappointingly rote guitar intro, but gives way to an aquatic dirge of twinkling guitars and a suffocating saxophone. It's an immensely evocative atmosphere, and devolves back to post-punk for the close, creating our slow, drawn out shock that these two sounds can come from the same band.

The minor key of "Roed", with its squirming hint of synth and elongated guitar static, makes for a darker mood we only hear in brief segments of other songs. But this song is also a conclusive chapter to the death march of "Sleep Tight". As an antidote, the following "Watch Out" gives us a trombone set to a percussion section-- unusual on this album, where guitars and cymbals often mark the beat. The tinge of post-punk shout-outs in the lyrics ("You better watch out" is hollered intermittently) make pretty good sense, as all the other instruments are similarly content to wow us with surprise: they skulk creepily, or suddenly arrive and recede. Even this song's gorgeous climax is understated, the brass rolling around in chaotic scales, guitars whining in the reverbed background-- but no instrument too loud, and none abrasive.

It's easy to imagine Slaraffenland scoring a film or an installation-- their rendition of the title subject on "Ghosts" is spot on, bringing in a mix of soft, textured aural luxury with ominous industrialized beats. Here, in a story-like arrangement, the first mood builds to the highly effected second, instead of sandwiching the noise within the calm as happens frequently in previous songs. The album as a whole is a brave perambulation, drawing on the acidic thunderstorms and gorgeous lullabies of two great Icelandic exports (Björk on "You Win" and Sigur Rós for aching closer "How Far Would You Go"). In music, it's not often that this borderline overindulgence, where structure and uniformity are all but forgotten, works. But here the members of Slaraffenland showcase their virtuoso skills and shared vision, always modestly.