Meditations on the Cosmic Tundra

Is it the sound of somebody moving on? Could it even be the sound of somebody formulating a worldview or sense of spirituality? The new album Muna from Markéta Irglová of Once fame seems to be all of these things in the context of an Icelandic awakening of sorts. Iceland seems to be on a lot of people’s minds these days with the advent of the band Of Monsters and Men and their prominent place on the soundtrack to the The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a film infused with sumptuous images of Iceland’s tundra landscape. And Iceland, the island country Irglová now calls home, is certainly on her mind.

The album’s title Muna means “to remember” in Icelandic, and by Irglová’s own telling, the album is infused with this sense of nostalgia that drew her there to live with her new husband and young child. “I had been to Iceland for the first time about four years ago to play a show with The Swell Season,” she writes in a statement on her website. “I fell in love with it then and was sad to leave, although I knew someday something would bring me back.” Irglová seems to be grappling with a lot of ideas and emotions about Iceland and her general place in the universe on this album, and has produced an Enya-esque hodge podge of melodies, piano, singing whales, laughing children and chiming church bells. It’s an album birthed from the mind of a very excited and bright eyed 26-year-old.

Irglová does her best to capture an emotion about the natural splendor of Iceland on tracks like “The Leading Bird” and “Remember Who You Are,” tracks which seem tailor made to be accompanied by videos of ethereal women running in flowing dresses through the crags and frigid creeks of Iceland. Of course, “The Leading Bird” does accompany a video of said ethereal woman writhing through an Icelandic fisherman’s home as water drips from her body and apparently from the air around her. No matter the image that is used, the sought after emotion seems to be one of awe and cosmic wonder at our smallness in the universe. And that is what the album seems to be about, capturing an emotion. While the music can be beautiful, it often sounds similar, and the approach is clumsy and teetering at the edge of overproduction.

The whale song that opens the track “Gabriel” is a beautiful concept in theory, but it leads to confusion when juxtaposed with such experimentations as the middle-eastern sounds on the song “Fortune Teller.” And when the whale songs give way to a bouncy rhythm with trombone accents, the song feels like the musical equivalent of swimming with the majestic creatures only to come up for air in a hurricane.

Spirituality abounds on the album in nods to nature and to non-sentient beings of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But Irglová, much beloved ever since her whirlwind rise to fame alongside her former partner in love and music Glen Hansard, can’t seem to decide what is most important to her now. She grapples with it all, and demonstrates her inability to pin any of it down. What we are left with is a genuine and heartfelt, yet unpolished musical outburst inspired by a Nordic landscape.