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Another Icelandic dreamer, Olvis is twenty-five-year-old Reykjavik-based musician Orlygur Thor Orlygsson. With tiny traces of Mogwai, My Bloody Valentine and Stars Of The Lid, Olvis scores soul-scraping sorrow using weeping guitars and tender keyboard and piano. Most appealing however, is the way he wraps heavy breaths and remote murmurs up as just another instrument - a little like Elizabeth Fraser - rather than the voice providing the narrative by which the song is driven.
Despite lacking anything approaching that killer change of pace over these eleven tracks, the throbbing ambience of highlights The Sea and Waterfall make that almost an irrelevance. Increasingly revealed on repeated plays, Olvis' Icelandic dreams are - for the most part - an ear-opening discovery.

Ian Fletcher
March-April 2004

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