Boy Lilikoi

"Boy Lilikoi" slows the forward momentum of Jónsi's solo album to offer something more introspective, a song that operates in the register of dream rather than action. The title's combination of ordinary noun and specific Hawaiian flower plant is characteristic of how the album manages sound — unexpected conjunctions that produce images both concrete and slightly displaced from reality. His falsetto here is at its most delicate, notes held at the edge of disappearance, the voice treated with a reverb that gives it the quality of sound in a large, empty space. The arrangement strips back relative to the album's maximalist moments: acoustic and electronic textures working together with space between them, the production allowing silence to function expressively. There's a boyishness in the lyric's imagery that is not infantile but rather has to do with wonder maintained past the age when it's expected — the capacity to remain astonished, to look at the world and find it not familiar but newly strange each time. This is music for the specific hour of early morning when darkness is loosening its grip but full light hasn't yet arrived — that threshold state that belongs to neither night nor day.