Efterklang: Piramida (4AD, 9/25/12)
“Apples”
Efterklang can hear dead people, or so it seems. Perhaps that’s why the Danish post-rock ensemble visited Pyramiden — a ghost town on the Arctic Norwegian island of Spitsbergen — to create its new album of similar name.
At the abandoned Russian settlement, its members wandered a landscape of streams and mountains, recording the sounds of seabirds, footfall, and rushing wind. In the studio, they added the ethereal vocals of a choir and the chime-like peals of a glass-bottle collection. Whether or not these sounds are messages from another realm, they summon haunting melodies and shiver-inducing rhythms. It makes perfect sense, considering that “efterklang” means remembrance and reverberation.
Drone, Drugs, and Harmony, the self-released debut by Kanas City, Missouri’s I Love You is unlikely to inspire the (unwarranted) hand-wringing, post-colonial guilt in which critics indulged over Vampire Weekend this last year, but both groups are equally indebted to past masters of African pop.