I'm Clifford Stumme, and I use literary analysis and research to explain the deeper meanings of pop songs. Feel free to leave a comment or to email me at clifford@popsongprofessor.com with questions or ideas!
All tagged Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir
"Organ" is the eighth track on Beneath the Skin by Of Monsters and Men, and the song is a departure from the much of the rest of the album. Not only is the music more like a ballad style than any other song, but the lyrics rely much less on abstract references to nature than other songs do. Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir leads the vocals single-throatedly on this song with a soft and airy style that reminds one of Ingrid Michaelson more than of the Norwegian singer's usual style.
"Slow Life" is the seventh track from Beneath the Skin, and it's infuriatingly difficult to puzzle out. The lyrics are vague and HEAVILY symbolic of something. Even if one understands the basic storyline, the event or thing being symbolized may still be beyond reach until Of Monsters and Men spills their secrets on their own. In the meantime, listeners will have to do the best they can to understand what's going on here. While the title is "Slow Life," the music of the song only halfway manages to accomplish the adjectival half of it. The song isn't especially slow; it's fairly quick and is engaging for that quickness. Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir is Of Monsters and Men's only singer on this track (apart from some punctuational background vocals), and her voice, as usual, is wonderfully eerie and haunting. Anything she sings takes on a whole new meaning and idea, giving a powerful mythos to "Slow Life" in particular.
While not the shortest song on Of Monsters and Men's Beneath the Skin, "Black Water" may have the fewest unique lines of any song on the album. In fact, not counting repeated choruses and lines, there are only 54 unique words in the entire song! The ninth track on Beneath the Skin is, however, still very interesting and fits well with the theme developed throughout all of the album: the acceptance of aspects nature imparts to human identity-a marrying of human civilization with nature's wildness.
Over the past month, Of Monsters and Men has been putting out singles from their upcoming Beneath the Skin, which will be released on June 9th. The album has 13 tracks, and the third is “Hunger” a powerful anti-ballad about what sounds like a suffocating relationship that needs to be ended. Four singles (“Empire,” “Crystals,” “Hunger,” and “I of the Storm”) have already been released.
Of Monsters and Men is really good at being cryptic and symbolic, leaving listeners to puzzle songs out on their own. Luckily, in their most recent single "Crystals" from their upcoming album, Beneath the Skin, they give readers a few clues that make the difficult meaning not impossible to decipher.
