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Pornopop - And the Slow Songs About the Dead Calm In Your Arms
PORNOPOP
And The Slow Songs About The Dead Calm In Your Arms

Iceland's Pornopop offer a longing stare through a frosty window into a warm roomful of intoxicating sound. And the slow songs about the dead calm in your arms' is a snowflake and a thunderstorm, captivating in its beauty and breathtaking in its intensity. Sparse poignant electronics support the gentle guitar work in sweeps and swells, while the honest and lonely vocals echo in the crevasses between the tranquil and
intrepid. The brothers Einarsson have woven a northern epic of
beautiful, unforgettable music.

1| Nicotine And The Backward Lounge
2| Centre
3| Death Tape
4| Stop
5| Sleep
6| It Doesnt Mean A Thing
7| Little Kafka
8| Yfirtonar
9| Wired To The Cold Metallic Scene
   
  Reviews

"So, why are we here? Our “fearless” editor-in-chief loves this record and demanded a review, for one. The other reason is craft. The Einarsson’s have it in spades. When you listen to a Morr Music release, say, there’s always going to be an obvious dud—the one track whose chord progression or beat programming reveals their just-past-the-presets naïve ineptitude. Pornopop took five years between their previous album and this—and the maturity shows. These songs, while loose and airy, are tight, (sad) pop constructions.

The Morr Music metaphor is also apt in sonic terms: Pornopop sounds like what might happen if the German and English artists that made up that label’s roster lived in Iceland. (The songs would get frostier, the tempo would slow to a crawl, the choruses would transform from dispassion to desperation.) In fact, while listening to “Sleep,” you might be forgiven if you had mistaken it for something on the label’s Blue Skied An' Clear compilation. The cavernous production is a ringer for late-era Slowdive, as is the track’s lengthy digression into packt, brittle beats and dreamy cooing.

...Pornopop is one of the rare groups that pull off the acoustics-with-electronic-garnishing trick well. While the slow-motion suicide is a bit of a slog, you get the feeling that there’s not a moment of waste on slow songs. In the filler-laden world of electronic pop, this might be the greatest shock of all." -STYLUS
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"Minimalistic instrumentation, but luminescent atmospheres define And the Slow Songs About the Dead Calm in Your Arms, the follow-up to their debut Blue, from the Icelandic duo Pornopop. Even the pair's track titles - "Nicotine and the Backward Lounge", Wired to the Cold Metallic Scene", "Sleep" - are evocative, their music belying both the pornographic and pop of their moniker.

Many of the numbers within have an almost lullaby like quality, drifting languorously on a bed of gentle guitars and blanketed by cottony synths, rocked by soft rhythms. "Death Tape", however has a more shadowed feel, "Little Kafka" a more abrupt rhythm, while "Stop" a more experimental edge.

Counter-pointing the song's wonderfully somnolent atmospheres and cozy musical currents are the almost icily cool vocals, floating almost disembodied across the backings, adding an arctic breeze to the set. An alum to lose one's self in, to ponder over, and let haunt one's dreams".-ALLMUSIC

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"Two years after its initial release in their home country of Iceland, Pornopop's And The Slow Songs About The Dead Calm In Her Arms is finally being properly dropped on American shores on Dynamophone - and not a moment too soon.  In 2004, it had been seven years since the release of their first album, Blue, making this release ripe for evolution of their increasingly representative Icelandic sound.    As it turned out, the Einarsson brothers created audio velvet with slow, Matmosian electronica and lulling, magnetic vocal effects.  Whatever the name Pornopop might mean to you, this isn't pop, and it's definitely not porno.  It's the slowest, darkest bedroom scene you'll ever see on a big screen. 
The melancholy pace of And The Slow Songs About The Dead Calm In Her Arms shapes the scene for the slow-motion ride through a superlunar Icelandic landscape.  The energy isn't merely subtle, it's just slow and operatic - like the soundtrack to a delicate science fiction.  Synthetic, alien beats bounce under tranquil, atmospheric guitars and strings while halogen vocals practically force your eyes closed. 
At its most intense, the album gets noisy instead of fast, but always dark.  "Death Tape" builds into an electronic maelstrom, complete with swirling effects and a yelling background voice, but always crawls along.  Most tracks still move like the eye of a hurricane.  "Centre" has wispy vocals and an occasional hollow, mechanized beat.  It'd be hard to believe any track ever reaches 90 bpm.  "Wired To The Cold Metallic Scene" closes the album with a glitchy lullaby, with liquid voices intertwining and piano drips like a melting icicle.

While they get intense at times, Pornopop never rushes And The Slow Songs About The Dead Calm In Her Arms.  It's for when the lights are off, but with nothing else going on.  Half-frozen guitars and chilly beats are the hallmark of their northern sound.  The visuals it conjures are minimal, unlike the videos of their namesake.  Pornopop must surely mean something completely different in Icelandic". -QROmag

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