By BENJAMIN O’CONNOR
I first fell in love with Laufey in my senior year of high school when I stumbled across the song “Street by Street” from her first album, “Typical of Me.” Since then, Laufey has had a few releases, including an album she performed with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, “A Night at the Symphony,” the album “Bewitched” which has gained her significant traction as of recent, and her most recent album, “A Matter of Time,” in which she explores some of her most vulnerable and personal thoughts in a collection of songs she has described as an expression of herself with a raw honesty that reflects the flaws, difficulties, and love along the journey of time. This article is my personal review of the album “A Matter of Time.” It should be known that describing myself as a “devotee” of Laufey is no understatement; she has been my number one most listened to artist on Spotify the past two years (0.5% of listeners) and I do not intend on dropping that streak anytime soon. When I first listened to this album, it was very late at night about two minutes after the album was released, and I had put a small speaker on my chest so as to not only listen to the music, but really feel it. Listen, I pull out all the stops for Laufey. Her music, to me, is not just music, but an experience that is deeply ingrained within me.
The album opens on a rather lighthearted note with “Clockwork.” Similar to themes she has sung about in the past, this song shares the relentless pattern of wanting to find romance in the most unlikely and anxiety inducing places, the fear of opening up with another person and how it is difficult to let yourself be with someone openly and with trust. Once that trust has invited you into the doorway however, she sings about how easy it is to waltz right inside the house, even if you don’t live there. The song uses the metronome of a clock and soft vocals singing “ding-dong, ding-dong” to eloquently paint a picture of slipping into the possibility of a relationship.
“Lover Girl” is the kind of song that was made to have the audience engage. I saw Laufey recently at her Ohio show at the beginning of August, and hearing the orchestra fall silent as Laufey clapped to the beat of the song and thousands of people joined her was a very grounding experience. This song just like… is so catchy. The woodwinds during the chorus just tickle my brain with the ever-so-slight “baba baba baba baba,” and the crescendo of anxious feeling that accompanies Laufey singing about seeing a love interest in her mind and everywhere with the then release of tension where she falls into a more easygoing and almost intentionally “I’m fine, I’m okay” semi-facade takes you on a journey. And this is the extent of alleged “official” reviewing I am doing. She’s just a lover girl, dude.
“Snow White.” Mannn, FUCK THIS SONG. It’s so good but OH MY GOD. The way in which Laufey shares body and beauty dysphoria is one of absolute clarity. I need to share that I do not know what it is like to be a woman, as, shocker, I am not one. But I am not devoid of my fair share of dysphoria and this song does all that needs to be done. It shares the rawness of truly believing you don’t have attractiveness or beauty, and not just in a self-destructive way but in an actual brain chemistry way; she sings, “I don’t think I’m pretty, it’s not up for debate… they try to tell me, tell me I’m wrong, but mirrors tell lies to me, my mind just plays along.” It is the struggle of knowing that what you are thinking objectively is self-sabotaging, but knowing just as well that your state of mind is fixed and the trouble of healing from that. The song also acknowledges some of the reasons as to why this happens, such as the beauty standards of society, as well as society’s value of women: “A woman’s best currency is her body, not her brain.” I heard this song for the first time in concert, and the standing ovation that SHE DESERVED made my democratically-elected Queen cry, something she admits to never having done on stage before, or at least not to that extent. That same concert she choked on a cracker.
“Castle in Hollywood” takes me back. It took me listening to it a second time to really get its meaning. At first I assumed it was another soliloquy to love, at least the romantic kind, but it is instead a story of losing another type of love: the special kind of love, the platonic kind. It’s a song about losing a best friend, and how everything changes. I am a strong proponent for the fact that grief appears differently for everyone, in different ways, and is a thing that does not always need a death to be elicited. Losing a best friend, a relationship you have put your energy, time and soul into, is not just something you move on from. It’s a scar that sits on your heart.
“Carousel” is such a quaint little song. It’s so nice. The song, to me, and I’m sure also just like what it’s about but also to me cuz this is my review so like chill out, is about letting people into your life. There is a point where you get to where the possibility of letting a certain person into your life or really anyone is a distant prospect, not from the sense that you don’t think you will get along with them, but instead from the view that sharing yourself and taking up space will cause them pain and waste their time, moving in circles, almost like a carousel.
“SILVER LINING” OH MY GOODNESS GRACIOUS I LOVE THIS SONG. The absolute dedication and deliberation to be with someone to the extent of going to hell with them both because you have spent so much time solely with them and also just going to hell literally for the hell of it is a strange kind of romance that I want to play at my wedding. Like. I’m serious. The video is also really odd but somehow makes perfect sense? I don’t know, this song just makes sense. Probably my favorite on the album.
“Too Little, Too Little” was a challenge that Laufey gave herself. She is very comfortable with writing songs about her love experience, but with this song she decided to write a song from the perspective of the boy who lets the girl go. She also did not write it with this in mind but it PERFECTLY MIRRORS the story of Conrad, Belly and Jeremaiah in “The Summer I Turned Pretty” and it pisses me off because that show is so amazing and so horrible and so messy and I have never gotten as invested as I have with that clusterfuck of a show. So now the emotional connotation whenever I listen to it is drastically different. Thanks, Belly.
“Cuckoo Ballet – Interlude” is a lovely reflection of Laufey’s classical background, as the style is reminiscent of iconic pieces like The Nutcracker, but with leitmotifs of the songs in the album, and whenever I listen to it I notice things that I didn’t before. I want to play this song in a band or collective. It’s so good.
“Forget-Me-Not” oh my oh my oh lord oh my oh lord oh goodness oh gracious oh my. I heard this song also for the first time in August and hearing it live sent me to another DIMENSION. I felt a feeling of longing and sorrow and shifted love from the back of both of my lungs that I have never felt before in my life. I am someone who has a very difficult time crying and expressing that emotion with published media (the only time I cry is for dog books and movies like “Hachiko Waits” and “Togo” with Willem Dafoe) and this song had tears WELLING. Absolutely WELLING in my eyes. The longing for Iceland and her home, the just emotion regarding her fame and connection, her, again, love for her homeland, the Icelandic parts placed so perfectly— this song encompasses the absolute talent of Laufey in her composition and singing ability.
“Tough Luck” makes everyone say that Laufey is their favorite rapper. I really liked that bit; because she sings kinda fast, she joked that she was releasing a rap album and I worriedly believed that bit when someone shared it with me. Regardless of this, “Tough Luck” is a great example of “lol sucks dude.” I will say it is really weird to hear Laufey with profanity. She rarely swears in her music, and so in this song and a few others it feels so much more real because of the controlled use of profanity. She will also put strong language in songs where you’re not expecting it when singing it live which is always amazing.
“A Cautionary Tale” means many things to me. It warns of bad relationships and putting your all into them, and then getting kicked in the stomach as a result of it. I’ve never really heard the phrases “draining personality” and “chameleon heart” but they are phrases that a lot of people I’m sure can relate to, myself included. They are those kinds of words that you never really think about until it’s made explicit, and then you wake up and realize an alleged friendship or difficult relationship with someone is not what it seems. That dang wool, man. Keeps getting in my eyes, my retinas are sad.
“Mr. Eclectic” is so groovy! And in a way, the opposite of “A Cautionary Tale.” While the previous song talked about changing yourself for others and the pain and hurt that can take, Laufey also sings about the receiving side of that, not allowing for an “either/or” approach to relationships, but a very conditional one. It is very true that two things can be true at the same time; you can put your all and maybe even parts of you that aren’t true into a relationship, and you can be frustrated by people that try to make themselves seem more appealing in order to win your favor. It’s a complicated world. We all have multitudes.
“Clean Air” is like a foreign possibility to me, and yet it is very familiar. The vibe of the song is very reminiscent of Laufey’s first songs in “Typical of Me,” with parts of it musically and energy-y related to songs like “Typical of Me,” “Just like the Movies” and “Someone New.” But also. It’s a country song. Almost not, though, it gives the vibe of a folk-country song, but Laufey saying the word “pastures” kinda makes it a country song. A peculiar surprise, but I wouldn’t say all that bad.
Lastly. Oh goodness. Lastly is “Sabotage.” It is literally about self-destruction and self-sabotage. Not only does she talk about the feeling of sabotaging her own happiness in relationship to another person, she is almost warning the audience inconspicuously. I say this because about ⅓ of the way through the song, it suddenly plays a brief amalgamation of orchestral dissonance; the screeching of strings, of rigid tremolo. The very personification of what she is saying so elegantly; what could be seen as the true sabotage of the entire album. This song is the antithesis of what Laufey is seen as: beautiful voice, melodic and harmonic talent, orchestral and composition aficionado. This song ends in harmonic dissonance-it works, but it sounds chaotic and self-destructive, and then just as suddenly drops off into nothing. The album loops, and we are back at the light-hearted story of “Clockwork,” or, if listening to the “Standard Edition,” the groovy classic “Just Like Old Times.” Either way, this return to normality is just as jarring and simply leaves you to sit in the beauty and the rawness that is “A Matter of Time.”
Featured Image: @laufeyclub on Instagram
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