Efterklang - Magic Chairs (4AD)

It’s not that often you find an album whose artwork perfectly matches the contents. And I mean perfectly here, not a little bit, or even mostly. The front cover of Efterklang’s third album makes for an unusual exception in that its depiction of self-propelled ribbons of colour and light provides an exact visual counterpart to the music contained within. Magic Chairs has been painted with the broadest of brush strokes, in a set of colours equally showy and understated, the slightly outré edge to their previous albums toned down in an approach that simply screams ‘pop’. But this is pop in the warmest and most inviting sense, straight from the Broken Social Scene school of raise-your-fist-and-pump-the-air-in-joy celebration music, none of your chilly electro-synthery here, thank you very much.

I’ve always had an odd relationship with Efterklang. Ostensibly there’s much about both their previous albums Tripper and Parades that should be so easy to love, but there’s always been some other factor at work, some snag that has prevented me from simply switching off and floating downstream. And for all its considerable charm, that same hitch still remains evident on Magic Chairs. Yet strangely it acts not to the record’s detriment, but to its credit – it’s almost as though the sheer breadth of vision on display here is able to prevent a listen being anything but an intensely concentrated experience. For a little bit of context, as I type I’m halfway through second song ‘Alike’, and as delicate swells of synth and brass lift Casper Clausen’s vocals adrift on a buoyant sea of noise I’m forced to pause it to concentrate on the sentence I’m writing.

Magic Chairs demands attention, but in the least obvious of ways. Instead of reaching out and grabbing the listener by the lapels, positively screaming ‘LOVE ME!’, it soaks in gradually over a number of listens. On first listen, the saccharine, almost-twee melody of ‘I Was Playing Drums’ breezes past in a pleasant rush - the sound of a busker playing a familiar song in a Tube station perhaps, or an instantly recognisable song on a passing car’s radio – and disappears into the background again. It’s only an hour or two later that it becomes obvious it’s well and truly lodged in there, and is stubbornly refusing to leave.

This curiously elusive quality is largely due to the orchestration. Make no mistake, this is one of the most beautifully arranged ‘indie’ albums I’ve heard in a long time, reaching for the heights of Owen Pallett’s recent masterstroke Heartland in subtlety and scope. There’s a delicate sleight of hand at play here that enables each song’s backbone of strings and brass to remain at times almost inaudibly buried in the mix, but to maintain a definitive presence. The hyper-percussive whorl of ‘Raincoats’ sounds sparse on initial inspection but upon closer examination reveals a densely layered core, and when the strings finally reach the fore on the jaunty thrum of ‘Full Moon’ the effect is one of dazzling, glorious release.

Best of all, though, remains ‘Alike’. Testament to Magic Chairs’ transcendent oddness, it initially seemed one of the album’s more unremarkable songs, breezing perfectly pleasantly through ever-so-slightly MOR leanings. But once again it’s the tiny nuances that prove definitive, and as a gradually rising interplay of brass begins to invade the track’s very centre and rip its very structure apart, it heads straight for the sky, dashing streaks of brightly coloured paint over all it touches, like an astral Jackson Pollack. For all my misgivings about Efterklang and that certain snag that just won’t let go, the prevailing wind is getting ever harder to resist.

By Rory Gibb

The astounding artwork that compliments the album was done by Hvass and Hannibal