So I missed this from a couple of weeks ago, and it’s a collaboration between 3 Icelandic artists, two of whom we haven’t featured previously, and one (CeaseTone) who we’ve written about way too much – in the nicest possible way, of course.
It’s a good opportunity therefore to feature the talents of JóiPé (Jóhannes Damian Patreksson) who came to prominence as part of the Icelandic hip hop duo JóiPé & Króli, and fellow Icelandic songwriter RAKEL, who has just released a lovely EP entitled ‘Nothing Ever Changes’ - more on that soon.
Anyway their new track is entitled ‘Ég var að spá‘, which possibly translates to ‘I Was Wondering’. Now we’ve suggested at NMR previously that collaborations often seem to be very heavily weighted towards one artist, and what’s really great about this song is that we get to hear the musical personalities and styles of all 3 equally – JóiPé opens up the track, whilst RAKEL provides the tune in the chorus, and melodically and instrumentally it sounds very ‘CeaseToney’.
Definitely one of my favourite individual tracks of the year, and judging from the video on this link here, they seem to have fun performing it.
Now as for the lyrics there’s a slight issue, because as you might have guessed from the title it isn’t in English and I have let my Icelandic language skills slip a little recently. The only words I can vaguely recollect for now (and I probably have these wrong) are Fuglahræðslu, þotupakki, and ‘gervitungl úr osti’ and given I can’t hear any of those words mentioned in the track I can only assume it’s not about a scarecrow flying out into space on a jet pack to rescue a satellite made of cheese. All other subjects by default are possible.
We will try and feature that RAKEL EP sometime in the next few weeks, and I’m sure CeaseTone will be releasing something pretty soon too. They’ll also all be sitting down to watch their good friend Dadi Freyr at Eurovision in Rotterdam in just under 2 weeks.