Efterklang return with ‘Things We Have in Common’, an album that celebrates the bond between humans and the power of community, looking at the beauty in humanity and how our differences can make us stronger.
‘Balancing Stones’ opens the album with slow and distorted effects, falling somewhere between electro clash and dream pop. The vocals gently glide over the glitchiness as the band wish to open ‘a window to your soul’. ‘Plant’ follows with falsetto vocals and a wave of synths and faltering drums that brings to mind The Antlers at their most alluring. ‘Getting Reminders’ opens with melodic acoustic strums before throwing in bursts of brass and handclaps that can’t fail to life your spirits.
Things get a little darker on the experimental Radiohead-esque Ambulance, with the band yearning for ‘a new beginning’ and delivering the words ‘don’t belong’ in elongated fashion over and over again. ‘Leave It All Behind’ has a neo-classical opening with echoed vocals describing a lonely night and desire to ‘Hold you tight, leave it all behind’. This is delivered against rhythmic and hypnotic piano notes. There’s beauty in the fragility of ‘Animated Heart’; a gorgeous blend of choral harmonies and chamber pop melodies: ‘All my love is against a rock. a singing bird on the mountaintop’.
‘Shelf Break’ continues in this fractured yet compelling fashion (‘Free yourself, let it go’) before ‘Sentiment’ falls somewhere between Mimas and Richard Hawley with the record’s defining statement at its core: ‘Everything revolves around love’. The album finishes with recent single ‘To a New Day’, which is a fitting joyous celebration about what’s to come next: ‘Like dreams in the night, it’s now or forever’.
