Album: Efterklang - Windflowers

Although Windflowers showcases Efterklang at their most direct, its sixth track “Living Other Lives” is its most instant, most straightforward composition.

However, the Danish art-poppers’ sixth studio album does not instantly makes its case as a full-bore adoption of up-front dynamics. Windflowers opens with “Alien Arms”, an understated reflection where vocalist Casper Clausen ponders whether the highpoints of the past can be reproduced in the present. Despite the restraint – and an intimate, Blue Nile-esque atmosphere – the flow is linear, the melody precise. “We’re moving through the clouds” sings Clausen.

When the poppy “Living Other Lives” arrives, there’s a rave-era shuffle, an insistent, rhythmic acoustic guitar motif and a hymnal vocal melody. The song builds, edges towards the anthemic and comes across as a future live highlight.

The tension between the innate reserve of “Alien Arms” and the forthrightness of “Living Other Lives” is brought together in one place for Windflowers’ final track, “Åbent Sår” – translated as open wound: it’s sung in English – where rhythms from Swedish dance-electronica musician The Field are introduced just after the three-minute point. The album ends with this acknowledgment that it’s about a creative balancing act.

Overall, Windflowers is recognisably an Efterklang album: one nodding more to Casper Clausen’s recent solo album Better Way and his and fellow band mainstays Mads Brauer and Rasmus Stolberg’s earliest forays as side-project Liima than its Efterklang predecessor album Altid Sammen. It’s an assured synthesis of what’s been going on in Efterklang's world in recent years. As such, it tracks back to 2010’s similarly direct Magic Chairs. Windflowers feels as if it’s been completed with live performance in mind and, if that’s the case, what will follow on stage should be as uplifting as what’s been captured on this lovely album.

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