My Head Is an Animal

Of Monsters and Men is an Icelandic rock band. Their album, My Head Is an Animal, had been on my wish list for a while, and I finally got around to buying it. It's terrific.

The group sings in English, and their sound is almost Celtic. The band I thought of most while listening was the Scottish group from years ago, Big Country. That's because OMAM's sound is big and sweeping--they pile on the overdubs (favoring the choral "Hey!") and lots of instrumentation, including brass and accordion.

Lyrically, the group favors a kind of holistic mysticism. The "animal" in the album's title is key--almost every song contains a reference to some sort of woodland creature or other, whether it's wolves, foxes, owls, tigers, or lions. They also reference crying seagulls and sharks.

The only other Icelandic group that made it big in the U.S. was The Sugar Cubes, and while OMAM don't necessarily sound like them, their lead singer, Nanna Bryndis Hilmarsdottir, both sounds and looks like Bjork. She has that breathy, little girl voice that tends to break, and she has the pixie look that Bjork has.

The best songs on the record are those that don't stint on what the band does best--go big. The two songs with airplay that I've heard, "Little Talks" and "Mountain Sound," are wonderful. The former seems to be a conversation with a mental patient, and the second just about getting away from it all. "Mountain Sound" is so joyously rendered that it's hard not to feel good upon hearing it.

My other favorite is "Your Bones," which really hammers home the Celtic folk-rock sound, with lyrics like: "In the spring we made a boat out of feathers out of bones, we set fire to our homes, walking barefoot in the snow. Distant rhythm of the drum as we drifted towards the storm. Baby lion lost his teeth now they're swimming in the sea." I don't know what it means, but I like it.