Munck/Johnson “Count Your Blessings” (Ponyrec 2006)

Denmark is Officially a Low Country

Danish duo Munck & Johnson like Low,- they must do because these songs owe a lot to their tremulous cathedral of sound. They must be particularly enamoured with older material like ‘Long Division’ or ‘The Curtain Hits the Cast’ as the songs here are like a trail of stars across a darkened sky that follow their own meandering logic; they eschew beats and beatifically drift on a current of melancholy as those early Low records did. That’s essentially all that happens here - guitars aren’t quite strummed, bass notes provide some bottom, atmospheric keyboards swirl around Camilla Munck’s angelic vocal, her words like small life rafts are buffeted on swelling waves of sadness.

‘Slavesong’ double tracks the vocal and is so Mimi Parker like that you could swear it was an original Low song. The vocal shares space with separate plucked guitar notes; you wait for moments of ecstatic catharsis – like the end of ‘Lust’ – they never arrive though, these songs deal with more subtle shading. There is an austere Scandinavian beauty in these songs though they speak more of the grey mist swaddled days of autumn rather then the clear bright endless summer days.

Date review added:  Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Reviewer:  David Cowling
Reviewers Rating:
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