Olof Arnalds is a pro and she gets it. She gets that live isn’t recorded and she is there to give a performance and at her record release party at Joe’s Pub last night she did precisely that. Behind an acoustic guitar and bass, the guitarist doubled on piano, she merged her folkie ways with a playful, energized, improvised playing and a quick witted funning demeanor, that won over the audience and kept them involved thru audience participation.
BUT
A coupla mistakes.
1. Olof performed a 90 minute set but paced for 60 minutes. It peaked way too early.
2. Even so, if she had re-arranged the set list it would’ve been OK. If you have an English song whose chorus goes “Tura Lura Lura” for God’s sake play it. The song, “Jonathan” is a slam dunk.
3. Oh, yeah, and the ambient song? Mid-set not near the end.
With that out of the way, from the opening “Innundir Skinni” through a beautiful cover of “She Belongs To Me”, Olof is perfection. Some of these songs are pretty depressing but none of them feel like anything less than heartfelt deprecations on the conditions she manages with. Playing a charango -a South American ukele, and finger picking it so it sounds like a banjo, the tackles songs off her self titled new album with a gusto and a charm that is simply dominating. Olof doesn’t let the trains that rattle beneath her, Joe’s Pub is situated over a subway station, bother her.
The set is a rolling thing of beauty, loose folk music which builds from melodies much sturdier than they have any right to be. Her voice is a sweet soprano though she can stretch to the upper register falsetto, and on the first knock out of the night, a slammy, smarty, longed out, singalonged “Crazy Car”, Olof takes her words of warning to a friend planning to move and changes it from a lovely downbeat whisper of advise, all finger picking prettiness, and allows it to evolve it a tribute, changing the admonishment to: DON’T GO TO NEW YORK CITY. By the end of the song she has us all singing back up. Which leads me to the lyrics -mostly in Icelandic, are sorta downbeat nature love metaphors The first line of the first song goes “The sun dissolves all bathed in amber hue…” You get the image. Her best lyric is an English language love song for a young son.
This is followed by what sounds like a Japanese folk song and then by a Weimar republic folk song.very Kurt Weillian before she reaches the shows climax. Olof calls it “making an omelet” and collaborator Davíð Þór Jónsson nods in agreement. It is finger picking guitar competitions and they do this to a superb cover of “I’m On Fire” and on cue a train rolls by as she sings “like a freight train running thru the middle of my head” .
She should have followed with “Jonathan” and called it a night.
Instead, a great idea was killed thru placement. Olof tells the audience to make calls, talk amongst themselves, go to the rest room while they play a lounge (but she means ambient) song “Altt I Guddi” (Bjork sings it on the album -and they have similar voices though that might have something to do with the Icelandic accents and the upper ranges: Olof can squeal when she wants to). The audience loves it, it frees em in a way I have never seen a musician do before it. But it is the wrong time for it. And it stops the set.
The set doesn’t really recover and the rest of the show drags to a conclusion though the robust audience joining on the”lalalala”of the final song “Vinur Minn” suggest my opinion is a distinct minority. In which case let’s leave Olof with a quote from one of her songs: “Why not just embrace it? A pop star is a pop star”.
Exactly.