A few years ago, the Icelandic band amiina took time away from touring with Sigur Rós and performed in a lighthouse because, you know, Icelandic band. In the crowd that day was a man who described how he had experienced the music travelling up through the lighthouse structure, and outwards across the ocean, as if the lighthouse were now projecting music instead of light. This rather cinematic sentiment inspired the band to embark on a full tour of lighthouses and other strange places to intimate crowds and, in turn, to release this EP/mini-album. Containing the songs from that tour – simple arrangements of old and new songs – The Lighthouse Project was recorded live in the studio in an attempt to project them outwards like that first lighthouse performance.
The album starts beautifully. Opener ‘Perth’ is the perfect way into the record. Each instrument carefully playing its own melody as if playing it any louder would break it. A combination of quietly plucked guitar, soft keyboards, thumb-pianos and bowed saws make for a rather lovely introduction.
Next is ‘Hilli’, a reworked version of a song from their 2007 full length debut, Kurr. It’s the same instrumentation as the opening song, but with added vocal “ahhs” that lift you from your seat and sit you right in the middle of their lighthouse. The next song, however, is where the record starts to go wrong. ‘Bíólagið’ is where the bowed-saw moves from background instrument to the foreground and, as unique as it makes the record sound, boy is it difficult to listen to. It’s played flawlessly, and the melody it’s trying to convey is perfectly lovely, it’s just that rather than transforming you to an intimate Icelandic lighthouse, you end up a land of fairy tales, unicorns and candy-cane tree trunks. It’s unsettling and not where you want to be.
As if to make up for the saw, the second the strings show up the album gets transformed yet again. The strings bring the weight. Without the warbling saw, the album has purpose and drive. There is no better example than ‘Leather and Lace’, a re-working of a Lee Hazlewood song, and his last recording before his passing. With the saw leading the melody, it’s meandering and insignificant, when the cello takes over it’s quite powerful and genuinely beautiful. It makes you wonder whether the instrumentation choice, the desire to strip songs down comes at the detriment of the songs themselves.
It feels like a cliché to use language like “delicate” or “intimate” but in truth, that’s all there is. And that’s OK. That’s all you really need here. Criticising the fact that it isn’t more expansive feels like criticising The Godfather for not being funny, or being unhappy at not being able to sing along to a Game of Thrones episode. But you can’t help but think back to the quote from the man in the lighthouse. If this album was to be transmitted from the lighthouse projecting music instead of light, would you even really hear it?
[Rating:3]
