Breathe

Iceland’s Leaves trade in big music, harking back to the heady days of The Waterboys and Echo and the Bunnymen in their prime. The pace rarely raises itself beyond stately, there are enough strings for an entire evening of chamber music, and the emotion is laid on as thick as the butter in a Kerrygold advert.

This may sound about as exciting as a muddy goal-less encounter between Scunthorpe and Kidderminster, and it could be, were it not for Arnar Gudjonsson’s delicious vocals, which turn otherwise ordinary tunes like ‘Go Down’, ‘Silence’ and the title track into highly intriguing aural adventures. Centrepiece, ‘Epitaph’ contains an entire relationship’s woes distilled into five minutes of melancholia.

That said, it does become a bit overwrought at times. ‘Crazy’ is a bit Verve-lite for my tastes, while ‘Deep Blue’ is probably intended as being glacial but ends up merely dreary. Things pick up again with ‘Suppose’, with its echoes of the mighty Turin Brakes, the relatively exciting ‘Race’, where these Leaves manage to blow themselves into something of a bluster, and the closing ‘We’, where Gudjonsson does as good a Chris Martin impression as you’re likely to hear.