01 - Dash and Blast
02 - We Flood Empty Lakes
03 - A Song For Starlit Beaches
04 - Illuminate My Heart, My Darling!
How often does it occur that a band can become one of the forefront groups of an entire genre after recording only four songs in their entire career? I know what you're thinking, it's as rare as spotting Nessy in great ole Scotland. However, this rarity that has so blessed our modern music scene is Yndi Halda, an incredibly young and talented band heiling from Canterbury, Kent in the UK.
Yndi Halda, which translates to "Enjoy Eternal Bliss" in some dialect of Icelandic, have brought to our attention four songs of epic proportion and beauty on their EP Enjoy Eternal Blis. Don't let the title of EP fool you, although Enjoy Eternal Bliss is only four tracks, it clocks at a little over 60 minutes, not one minute of which drags or fails to stir up emotions. Yndi Halda displays an ideal mix of Godspeed You! Black Emperor-like epic proportions and the breathtaking beauty of Explosions in the Sky, and they deserve every right to be compared to those two bands. If Yndi Halda releases one or two more records better than or up to par with Enjoy Eternal Bliss, I will easily class them as the greatest post-rock band ever without a faint of doubt, that is unless the upcoming Explosions in the Sky album matches The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place in magnificence.
Anyway, Enjoy Eternal Bliss was originally released in 2005 with only three tracks on it, which excluded "A Song For Starlit Beaches". There were only 300 copies of this original release all of which were pressed by the band and had individual hand-made album artwork, some of which can be seen here. Which means, all 300 copies of the original Enjoy Eternal Bliss were different and are floating around in the hands of a lucky few. However the band re-realesed the EP recently with four tracks on it via Burnt Toast Vinal.
Every track on the EP is absolutely remarkable, although "A Song For Starlit Beaches" sticks out the most because since it was recorded later, it sounds like a different, all-be-it still as remarkable as ever, Yndi Halda. Unlike the other tracks like "Illuminate My Heart, My Darling!", who alternate from soft to loud and build into epic crescendos in what seems to be two seperate parts, "A Song For Starlit Beaches" builds and builds, but always plateaus rather than stirring into a giant uproar of noise which you would expect from post-rock bands. Thus the song creates more tension than any other song, which makes the eventual crescendo extremely satisfying and worth the time and effort you've put into listening to the song.
So all-in-all, Yndi Halda is an extremely talented band with a very promising future that would even make Chaucer happy. Cheers for the future of post-rock!
2 comments:
I listened to them. They're awesome. They've introduced emotion into a somewhat drained genre (Of what I've seen)
They really are one of the best new bands of the genre.
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