Jóhann Jóhannsson - And In The Endless Pause There Came The Sound Of Bees

Jóhann Jóhannsson - And In The Endless Pause There Came The Sound Of Bees (NTOV)

Originally produced as a score to an award-winning film by Marc Craste called “Varmints”, the Icelandic composer has decided to release this as an album in its own right. Jóhannsson has an ear for drama - his melodies and structures range between the soaring and the despondent, but always retain an emotional kernel at their heart. As such, it’s hard not to get sucked into the cinematic hallways of his work despite it being hard to find anything particularly original to grasp.

“Endless Pause” is a short work, with Jóhannsson mixing traditional strings and piano with a barely discernible underlay of electronics. The album’s melodic leitmotif begins straight away with “Theme”, the strings building and dying with an undulating skill that makes it hard to discern the required emotional response. “City Building” introduces human voices to a dramatic crescendo of violins, expiring as quickly as it builds, but it’s not until the 4th track “The Flat” that we hear electronics, a processed stream of sounds bending in and out, topped off with an ever-so slight veneer of melody. It glides gently into some treated piano that takes the listener out of the melancholic depression built by the last two tracks, and segues into the wonderfully uplifting “Rainwater”, gentle squalls of distortion accompanying the soaring melody. As described before, it’s hard not to be taken in by Jóhannsson’s emotive displays, as his songs contain simple flourishes that keep you coming back.

The album lilts a little with the fairly non-descript “Pods” and “The Gift”, but reasserts itself in a wonderful fashion with the best tracks on the album, “Dying City”, Jóhannsson mixing spasms of radio static, icy echo and ghostly vocals in a masterful fashion, and then “Escape”, baroque strings building in an ominous fashion to a climatic fashion not unlike Murcof. He sees out proceedings with a re-interpretation of the album’s opener, applying electronics to give the melodies a crystalline effect and transposing key changes with vocal harmonies.

From a technical perspective, “Endless Pause” is hard to fault, but beyond the rapid polarisation of moods throughout, it was hard to discern much beyond this melodic dichotomy. Music that provides an atmospheric vision can often appeal all too easily to senses beyond our ears, and Jóhannsson’s Icelandic heritage can only help to build ideas of austere glacial splendour with the choice of instrumentation on this album. As a short burst of cinematic escapism, “Endless Pause” is a wonderful piece, but upon reflection I found little to savour apart in the long term. Nothing in the way of Apoidean related content either.

Toby Frith