Songs We Love: The Amazing, 'Safe Island'

Enlarge this image

The Amazing. Courtesy of the artist hide caption

toggle caption

Courtesy of the artist

The Amazing.

Courtesy of the artist

It's easy to use hyperbolic adjectives when describing songs like "Safe Island." The Amazing crafts a sound that's huge, sprawling, immense and so on, but words aren't worth much when you're confronted with a song this enveloping. Picture You, the Swedish band's third album, touches on the psych-rock guitarist Reine Fiske previously made with Dungen, but The Amazing ventures further, dipping its toes into shoegaze and psychedelia without drowning in era-specific signifiers.

In "Safe Island," Christoffer Gunrup's voice is so bathed in effects that it's nearly impossible to decipher what he's singing about. Instead, you're left with a shapeless quality that's both beautiful and immensely sad, all before the song dissolves into a feedback-driven coda.