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| Drownedinsound |
 Originally released towards the back end of 2010, the austere charm of Danish-born and Berlin-based singer songwriter Agnes Obel’s debut album has seen it dominate charts across the continent, gracing top ten best seller lists on France and the Netherlands, and sitting at number one in her patria for seven weeks. In case its UK release passed you by I wouldn’t worry; it’s fair to say that, despite warm critical acclaim, coverage and public reaction in the UK has been more restrained than across the channel. This re-release is unlikely to address that, but will hopefully serve to give an assured and richly textured debut the additional attention it deserves.Aged 29 when Philharmonics was released, Agnes had the break that so many talented unknowns must dream of, when a Berlin advertising exec stumbled across one of her MySpace demos (apparently some people still use the site) and paired it with a mobile phone ad. Whilst not the most glamorous route to fame it did put her on the radar of Thomas Vinterberg, co-founder of the Dogme 95 movement. Thus followed demos featuring in his film Submarino, and Agnes receiving a Robert award (essentially a Danish Oscar) for song of the year. Fuelled by word-of-mouth, the album has since worked its way into the ears and hearts of many a critic across Europe....full text |
| Bbc |
| Such is the exceptionally sparse nature of Agnes Obel’s debut album that it slips by almost unnoticed lest you lend it a distraction-free, focused ear. It is highly advisable you do so: the compositions that lie within are slow, sombre, sepulchral even, but not without a sense of occasionally singular beauty. A case in point is Riverside, which follows the instrumental Falling, Catching as the first song proper. Entirely built around piano and voice, its soft pleas for solitude and escape are utterly disarming, Obel’s mournful lyric as chilled as the body of water she’s inexplicably drawn to. Philharmonics is a resolutely early hours affair; a kind of Scandinavian counterpart to the British duo Felix’s wonderful You Are the One I Pick of last year. But where that record generally eschewed structure in favour of dark flights into the surreal, Obel keeps things tight and lean here. Such elements as percussion and auxiliary instrumentation rarely impinge on these songs, and when they do it is sometimes difficult to tell (one notable exception being her meditative cover of John Cale’s I Keep a Close Watch, here simply titled Close Watch). Oddly for an album that dabbles in such twilit, shadowy waters, it supplied communications giant Deutsche Telekom with music for their recent advertising campaign in Germany, which is where the Copenhagen-born Obel now resides. Just So is the track in question, and while its bright melodies and straightforward lyrics sit at odds with the surrounding, songs like this and Brother Sparrow do furnish Philharmonics some much-needed lightness....full text |
| Musicomh |
| Time is cruel to beauty. Much that is lovely will falter, and the greater its former splendour the clearer its decline. The wilting of a flower. The crumbling of once-great architecture. Madonna. And so it is with music. Some examples? In 1994, Enigma's Return To Innocence seemed like a soul-affirming reach into our collective inner mystic. Today, it's a cringe-worthy turd of a song with all the mysticism of Derek Acorah. And in 2006, our collective hearts beat with the twinkled ache of Jose Gonzalez' soft-hewn meanderings. Yet, what once was life-affirming is now as inspiring as the beige waiting-room in a hospice for synesthetes. It's the curse of any song with a vein of emotion to age badly, and few mature unhexed. It's like reading an old diary - every entry of heartbreak once meant so much, but now they only make you wince at the bare sentimentality. Does anyone still listen to Damien Rice without wishing he'd just cheer up? Really? You do? Go write in your diary... So what future for Agnes Obel? The Copenhagen-born songbird is best known for soundtracking a corporate ad campaign (for Deutsche Telekom) and going cross-genre by doing a heartfelt reworking of a well-known hit (John Cale's I Keep A Close Watch). So far, so Gonzalez. And her debut album, Philharmonics, is full of exactly that emotive beauty that could be so easily ravaged by that cynical passing of time. Yet are all so easily flawed?...full text |
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