PRICE:
$15.50
IN STOCK
ARTIST
TITLE
Endless Summer
FORMAT
CD

LABEL
CATALOG #
MORR 154CD MORR 154CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
5/12/2017

Sóley is back with her third solo album, Endless Summer. Written over the period of one year together with her long-time friend and collaborator Albert Finnbogason, the new full-length sees the acclaimed musician from Iceland explore the more optimistic, sun-drenched corners of her songwriting. Sóley's latest offering is the warmth beneath the snow at the end of winter, the seeds waiting to grow as spring whispers to us. From the heavy organs, synths, and minor keys of her last album Ask the Deep (MORR 138CD/LP, 2015), Endless Summer emerges with a kind of hopeful sweetness, and feels even more vulnerable. "The idea for the album came pretty randomly one night in beginning of January 2016 when I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote a note to myself: 'Write about hope and spring'," she says about the album's general direction. "So I painted my studio in yellow and purple, bought a grand piano, sat down and started playing, singing and writing." And Endless Summer delivers just that, opening with the song "Úa" (named after her young daughter) that washes over the listener like a hopeful dream. It's based on an adventurous acoustic arrangement reminiscent of Joanna Newsom or Agnes Obel, which sets the tone for what is to follow in its wake. Throughout the new album, Sóley's arrangements for a small orchestra give Endless Summer a colorful touch: Take, for example, the track "Never Cry Moon", in which the sound of clarinet, trombone, and cello beautifully engulf Sóley's repetitive piano playing. Comprised of eight songs, Endless Summer is an album that's grounded in fertile wisdom. Not just an ethereal dream of love and light, but a subtle, accumulative wisdom. One might say that one of Sóley's signature is the childlike wonder in her lyrics, and Endless Summer delivers the same wonder, but with a kind of reverence for it, for she's no longer a wanderer in a nightmare, but an enchanted lover of mystery. Endless Summer is like the Icelandic summer, a liminal, endless turning, a shift of consciousness, an endless awakening of continual brightness not without the acknowledgement of winter; it is the eruption from which the rebirth of light emerges.