Raucous folk

Icelandic folk giants Of Monsters Men erupted fully formed onto the global scene with pop gem Little Talks, but the evolution of their musical style has been much more glacier-like, singer Raggi tells JIM CARROLL

Like all the best music stories, this one starts with a song. The current state of the pop landscape dictates that Of Monsters Men’s Little Talks was a tune destined for success.

It possessed everything you could want in a modern-day pop hit: folk bits, pop bits and a brilliantly oddball ska twist with a trumpet, as if some Kingston rudeboys went rogue and started hatching bluebeat gems in deepest Iceland.

All through last year, you heard Little Talks at every turn. It was one of the tunes on repeat at last year’s SXSW festival as Of Monsters Men seduced tastemakers under the Texan sun. Within a few months, it was never off the radio.

It was a wham-bam favourite on YouTube (46 million views and counting) and became the tune which soundtracked every festival the Icelandic band played last year – and they played a lot of them. It was – and still is – one of the most effective get-up-and-go tunes of recent times.

Every band would love a calling card like that to hawk around, and the band’s co-frontman Raggi Pórhallsson knows just how fortunate they have been in this regard.

“It just sort of happened like that, we had no idea it would get such positive feedback,” he says. “When we recorded the demos for My Head is an Animal, we didn’t even think of it as the big single. It just had its own intentions.

“We like people to read their own things into the lyrics, but this is about a couple where the husband passed away and it’s from the conversation between the two of them. We were inspired by people that lived in our house, an old couple that lived there for 30 years.”

Dealing with the acclaim for, and popularity of, Little Talks is not something Of Monsters Men were expecting to have to do. Back home in Iceland, they were one of many bands making music and playing gigs. For such a small country, Iceland’s prowess in producing interesting musical acts is quite striking, though few outside of Björk have really graduated to the big leagues. But OMM became one of the big breakout international acts of recent times and one of the very few Icelandic bands who can rely on something more than underground acclaim.

“I don’t think people sometimes really realise that there actually is a lot of music from Iceland,” Pórhallsson says. “But it’s hard for bands to get out there and be able to go overseas and travel. If they go, not many people show up at first and you have already spent a lot of money to get there so it’s hard in terms of money. We have been lucky because we have a really good team around us. We’ve also been a little bit lucky. We were in the right place at the right time.

“A lot of people at home thought we were an American band at first. They said we’re not very Icelandic, but I don’t really know what would be typical Icelandic. It’s hard to stand out from all the other bands in Iceland because you don’t want to sound like anyone else. It’s a small country, so you definitely don’t want to sound like anyone else.”

That Icelandic scene, he notes, has also faced problems in the wake of the country’s infamous economic collapse in recent years. “Venues are being torn down. When everything was doing well with the economy, before the banking crisis, people had this great idea to build a huge music hall. So now that we have this big place, there’s this thinking going around that the bars and clubs should close down, because we have the giant music hall. But those small bars and clubs are where people want to go when they go out to hear music.”

For him and his bandmates, the success of OMM has meant they can concentrate full-time on music and touring. Prior to all this, some of them were in college, one was a plumber, another worked in a meat factory and another was an airport security guard. “When it all took off, we gave it all up. I think we all thought ‘yes, I want to be in a band all the time!’”

Pórhallsson mentions at one point how Mumford Sons have paved the way for bands like them to beat a similar folk drum. But while they may both be tagged as folk, OMM are a much different band in other respects. They’re a raucous live entity, a band who began to use volume initially as a way to overcome the talkers in their audience and found it very much to their liking.

“We didn’t plan out things, it’s just how our sound developed. It would make more sense if we had said one day ‘we should try to sound like this’ but that’s not what ever happens. Our music just sort of evolved. All of us like Arcade Fire and Arctic Monkeys, so I think that has had an effect on our sound. We’ve got acoustic guitars and arena-sounding drums, dramatic pianos and guitars. There’s a lot going on at once.”

The band spent most of 2012 touring, but minds are already slowly turning to what the follow-up to My Head is an Animal will sound like. Pórhallsson thinks the huge amount of travel they’ve done will have a big bearing on album number two.

“We have experienced so much in the past few years that has changed us and everything seems to have moved really fast. But when we go home to Iceland, it’s different because things move at a much slower pace there. It’s a different world. The next album is definitely going to be inspired by what we’ve been doing. We will approach it slowly, but something is definitely happening and we look forward to bringing it to life.”

Of Monsters Men play Dublin’s Olympia on February 21st