Many of you won’t have come across Radio Iceland yet, but we heartily recommend them at Nordic Music Review, they’re a new English speaking radio station in Iceland which pretty much plays exclusively Icelandic music, and has some interesting local interviews (again in English) which will help you get to know the island and the culture slightly better. Anyway it was through them that i came across Red Barnett, the project of Halli Sveinbjörnsson, Reykjavik based singer/songwriter, and his debut album ‘Shine’.
Sveinbjörnsson is a 4 times Icelandic Music Awards nominee, who’s spent most of his working life writing arrangements and compositions for other artists – he studied classical composition in Sweden. But in his own time over the last 10 years he’s been slowly working on a series of his own songs, which he’s now been able to record and arrange through a ‘pledge’ funding scheme, , which only started at the end of February and quickly reached the funding goal – a demonstration of the high regard that he’s held back at home.
Red Barnetts album is simple enough sounding, a series of 11 songs which are heartfelt, fairly melancholy and pretty much rely on guitar, piano and occasional string arrangements. It opens with the big acoustic guitar sound of ‘Every second counts’, not the strongest song on the album by any means, but it just has this lovely sound to it. And by the time ‘My Island’ has opened with a strumming guitar and a cello, we know we’re in for a treat musically.