Cheek Mountain Thief - Cheek Mountain Thief

The first 20 seconds of Cheek Mountain Thief’s self-titled album, with its gentle guitar strums, feels a little like a brook gently flowing down an Icelandic forest, where the leaves of trees are lit up with that fresh kind of sunshine you don’t get anywhere else.

Which is exactly the point. Tunng frontman Mike Lindsay has created a love letter of an album to the beauty of Iceland, after having taken up residence in a tiny village and falling in love with a native. Instead of showing us pictures though, he’s created an album that has a strange kind of expansiveness to it, with feelings of isolation, but never loneliness.

You could give almost any portion of any song on ‘Cheek Mountain Thief’ a similarly flowery description to the one in the opening paragraph of this here review. But that would make for a crap review. With its brass introduction and darkly lilting folk strains, ‘Strain’ is definitely one of the highlights of the album. The boy / girl vocals also work brilliantly at adding another layer to the track. But then you’re pushed out of the moment by the song changing rhythm completely mid-way; it switches back, but the feeling is somewhat ruined, or at the very least tainted.

And that’s a problem for much of the album. The more experimental moments tend to jar with the beauty and softness of the folk that comprises most of Cheek Mountain Thief’s sound. This isn’t always an easy listen – but you can’t help but feel that it should be. Early on in the album, the worst culprit is ‘Showdown’. Its strings are lively and energetic, balanced out by lazily soft vocals. Lovely stuff. But it’s broken up by Icelandic screeching, that rips you out of the laidback soundscape and presents you with freezing cold tundra.

After a few listens, you start to get used to these disjointed moments. But they’re still there, and rather than adding to the feeling of an album, they take away from it. ‘Cheek Mountain Thief’, like Lindsay’s previous works, would still have happily fallen into the experimental folk category without them, and it’s a shame that an otherwise good album is marked by moment-ruining sounds.