Tuesday, September 1, 2009

This is For The White In Your Eyes


This Is for the White in Your Eyes, the full-length debut by Danish collective Choir of Young Believers , is teeming with instruments—voices, pianos, synthesizers, banjos, an orchestra’s ransom in strings and French horns.

But when you listen it’s not the arrangements that dominate so much as the images they conjure. Snow-flecked mountaintops, deserted city streets, ghost-filled churches, a final kiss between estranged lovers—this is the emotional terrain trod by Jannis Noya Makrigiannis and his Choir of Young Believers.

This Is for the White in Your Eyes is an album of orchestral indie-pop, but its artistic scope extends beyond melody and harmony: Choir of Young Believers paint cinematic tableaux, with Jannis cast as the silvery-voiced narrator. It's truly beautiful stuff and despite how complex everything gets with all the arrangements and instrumentation its nice that the songs deep down are nothing but simple pop songs. "Action/Reaction," is a perfect demonstration of this as it sounds something like Brian Wilson would write if he were 25 years old today and resurrected Lush. The song takes a harmony, warps it, repeats it, surrounds it with a teenage symphony to god and well comes up with a perfect little pop song. Epically brilliant pop that's rooted in simplicity.

Download: Action/Reaction
Download: Next Summer

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