{"id":2132,"date":"2012-02-14T16:33:09","date_gmt":"2012-02-14T21:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=2132"},"modified":"2012-02-14T16:33:09","modified_gmt":"2012-02-14T21:33:09","slug":"of-monsters-and-mens-into-the-woods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/14\/of-monsters-and-mens-into-the-woods\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Monsters and Men’s Into the Woods<\/i>."},"content":{"rendered":"

If you missed it, my top impact prospects for 2012 piece<\/a> went up yesterday, as did my quick reaction to Yoennis Cespedes signing with Oakland<\/a>. My first draft blog post of the year went up today, talking SoCal high school kids<\/a>, including probable top ten picks Luc Giolito and Max Fried.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

I caught Of Monsters and Men’s debut single, \u201cLittle Talks,\u201d on XMU over the weekend and became borderline-obsessed with it after just that one listen. The band won the M\u00fasiktilraunir, an Icelandic national battle of the bands, in 2010, although a look at the winners list tells me that doesn’t typically mean much beyond the small island’s coastlines. (The 2001 winner, Andl\u00e1t, was a death metal act whose name translates as \u2013 wait for it \u2013 \u201cDeath.\u201d) Of Monsters and Men seems ready to break out internationally on the strength of that single and the forthcoming album My Head is An Animal<\/i>, which earned very strong reviews when it was released in Iceland last fall. I can’t profess much experience with Icelandic folk music, so it’s easier for me to define them in terms of other genres, and their first EP release, Into the Woods<\/i>, shows a pretty broad base of styles that call to mind Arcade Fire, Mumford and Sons, Doves, ska-punk, Irish folk music, and \u2013 of course \u2013 a little Sugarcubes too. (It’s on amazon<\/a>\"\" and iTunes<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\u201cLittle Talks\u201d is the song to buy if you only want to buy one track, an upbeat horn-driven track with a riveting call-and-response vocal track from the group’s two lead singers, Nanna Brynd\u00eds Hilmarsd\u00f3ttir and Ragnar \u00de\u00f3rhallsson, the former singing about losing her tether to reality while the latter, her lover, tries to comfort her while expressing his grief at watching her mind wither. The most poignant back-and-forth gives the song its title, as Hilmarsd\u00f3ttir sings, \u201cThere’s an old voice in my head that’s\/holding me back,\u201d to which \u00de\u00f3rhallsson responds, \u201cWell tell her that I miss our little talks.\u201d Yet this story is layered over a hybrid of Irish drinking songs and the short-lived ska-punk movement of the mid-1990s, complete with raise-your-glasses shouts punctuating the gap in the lyrics following each chorus. I couldn’t get it out of my head after the first listen.<\/p>\n

The other three tracks on the EP are all strong, but nothing is similar to \u201cLittle Talks\u201d in style or feel. \u201cLove Love Love,\u201d the next-best track, reminded me a little of Norah Jones meets Alison Krauss, with Hilmarsd\u00f3ttir expressing regret to a lover whose affection she can’t quite return. The closing track, \u201cFrom Finner,\u201d is probably the most Mumford-ish, with a gloomy percussion-heavy shuffle behind mournful vocals, ending each chorus with a \u201cwe’re so ha-ppy\u201d that I don’t think we’re really supposed to believe. \u201cSix Weeks\u201d is your Arcade Fire-influenced track, heavier on the drums as well with a marching, almost Bonham-esque beat that shares the front of the stage with the group vocals. All four tracks appear on the full album, due out in April, but I wasn’t going to wait that long to get \u201cLittle Talks\u201d on my iPod. It’s the best new song I’ve heard in at least a full year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you missed it, my top impact prospects for 2012 piece went up yesterday, as did my quick reaction to Yoennis Cespedes signing with Oakland. My first draft blog post of the year went up today, talking SoCal high school kids, including probable top ten picks Luc Giolito and Max Fried. — I caught Of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[498,161,653,852],"class_list":["post-2132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-folk-music","tag-highly-recommended","tag-iceland","tag-music","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2133,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132\/revisions\/2133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}