06) Efterklang - Magic Chairs (4AD)
The Leeds Student, 05/03/2010
Efterklang dress excellently. Seeing them in Mine Bar at last year’s Brainwash Festival was a fashion epiphany. The large ensemble scrubbed up as a caricature of Scandinavia chic, virtually a different coloured trouser on every member. Depressingly, however, recent press shots see them all clad in check shirts. Check shirts. They could easily find themselves a camouflage amongst half the people in the Brudenell Social Club on any given evening. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care about clothes - I don’t even wear clothes - but what I am doing (with journalistic finesse) is using Efterklang’s freshly homogenised dress sense as an allegory for their musical direction.
Every song sounds like it might be Efterklang, but is probably that band that sounds a bit like Efterklang. A frantic process of fashionable endumbening has hindered what might have organically evolved into something much more idiosyncratic. ‘Modern Drift’, for instance, sounds like it was written for a Lloyds TSB ad, with the timid-but uptempo piano evoking the twinkling promise of a government bail-out. To be honest, ‘Natural Tune’ also does. Bank adverts seem to be a recurring influence on this album.
There is no anti-pop agenda to this review, however. Once one is done mourning the passing of old-Efterklang, it’s easy to appreciate some of Magic Chairs’ remarkably lovely tracks. ‘The Soft Beating’ launches into the most listener-friendly song the band have penned, and ‘Full Moon’ - even if it does jump on the plink-plink catchy-wagon of Grizzly Bear’s ‘Two Weeks’ - is a refreshing number in its own right. ‘Harmonics’ shouts Anathallo at every turn, the light hearted melding of simple Sufjan-esque strings and brass harmonies, the syncopated female chorus, and even the lead vocal contours - one of the frankly few musical features that originally differentiated them from Anathallo - but it’s further proof that Efterklang can write good songs, at a distance from their established style. Another highlight is ‘Raincoat’ which, despite an ominously twee intro, unfolds as a rhythmically driving treat.
This album may run panting after the 2009 check-shirts-but-pop-album bus, but it works. The approach has not been as successful as for Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Cold Cave (stop me), and this is not at all what Efterklang do best, but this record is worth a listen all the same.
