After three solo EPs comes Sunna Margrét’s debut full-length album released on a DIY label established with her husband Stéphane Kropf.
Female Icelandic artists must be mightily fed up with comparisons to Björk but when the experimental pulsing synth pop sound is so derivative it’s hard not to take the global superstar as the benchmark.
Sunna says “I wanted to dance, so I made upbeat music” but very few tracks are obvious floor fillers. For example, the jerky stop-start rhythms of Figure and the brooding atmospherics of Hibiscus would demand some very creative dance moves.
The singlesChocolate and Come With Me (“Touch me there”) are more likely to please party animals.
The best thing you can say about this album is that it is ambitious although Sunna’s mostly spoken word vocals seem to compete with rather than compliment the intricate soundscapes.
Ultimately, the promised good time values fail to materialise as a mood of sultry melancholia dominates.
