Choir of Young Believers – This Is For The White In Your Eyes

If you were to first listen to the oddly-titled album This Is For The White In Your Eyes without knowing that rather than a choir, it was by a Dane called Jannis Makrigiannis and a few chums, you could quite easily think it was sung by some huge group of robe-clad, solemn Scandinavian types. The multitracking on Makrigiannis' voice, combined with the cavernous, echo-heavy production, gives this record an almost hymnal, religious sanctity. To use a crude and hateful band mashup metaphor, Choir of Young Believers are like ELO meeting Fleet Foxes in a cathedral - this is sometimes stoic, but frequently sweeping music, its guitars pushed into the background, serving mostly as support for gushing, flowing waves of strings and similarly orchestral arrangements.When This Is For The White In Your Eyes is at its best, it's verging on phenomenal. It always feels like a bad idea to say that an album's best tracks are its loudest, most upbeat ones - it's easy to imagine it being taken as an admission of being a musical neanderthal who can't appreciate records with gravitas, restraint, and atmosphere. But as much as I like all those things, it's still the more upbeat songs which impress most here. Their relative concentration on the first half of the record is its chief problem, amplifying the set's inherent inconsistency.But those good songs - they're superb. Five minute album openers always make me raise an eyebrow, but this is one of those which really impresses and excites in preparation for the remainder of the album - "Hollow Talk" is gloriously slow building, introducing us to Makrigiannis' wonderful, silvery voice until the song's gripping, drum-dominated climax takes over, leaving our narrator to let out a couple of concluding lines at the end, like an addendum. The album's other two great moments feel like a pair - the singles that come in the form of "Next Summer" and "Action/Reaction" which follows soon after it. These two rank close to the best songs of their kind this year - they are sweeping and grandiose, and yet infectious - impressive stuff.That is not to say that the rest of this very distinctive album isn't enjoyable - whilst the uniform darkness of its mood in the second half drags it down a little, this is still a very strong record imbued with some great production - the drums in particular sound gorgeous, and Makrigiannis' voice is a thing of beauty. Imperfect, and suffering from a loss of steam in its second half, this is nevertheless a record to recommend quite heartily.

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