Efterklang's ambitious music is often grandiose, but the Danes say they strive for restraint

If anything was apparent on Efterklang's 2007 disc Parades, it's that the Danish group revels in musical excess. More than 30 musicians guest-starred on the sophomore album, pumping up the band's indie-pop jams with symphonic string arrangements, bountiful brass, and massive sing-alongs that made fellow orchestral-rock acts like Arcade Fire and Architecture in Helsinki seem positively skeletal in comparison. Last fall, Efterklang pushed things to the extreme by cramming itself and all of the Danish National Chamber Orchestra on-stage to perform Parades in its entirety.

With such a taste for the grandiose, it's surprising to find the members of Efterklang floored by a fan's recent cover of their tune “Mirador” on YouTube. Though originally bursting with piano runs, gang vocals, and bombastic marching-band beats, Tokyo-based musician Gihm's minimalist version, also posted on the group's Web site, was performed on nothing but acoustic guitar. As lead singer Casper Clausen reports, it's given Efterklang a new way of looking at its own music. After years of adding every instrument imaginable to its epic pieces, the combo wants to keep things low-key.

“We always try to push ourselves in a simple direction,” he says from his Copenhagen home. “But we work with music in a difficult way. We try to explore it in every single corner until we find something we like.”

As gorgeous as the soundscapes are on Parades, Clausen complains that Efterklang's core members—multi-instrumentalist Mads Brauer, guitarist Rasmus Stolberg, pianist Rune Mølgaard, and drummer Thomas Husmer—always over-analyze their songs. It took more than two years for the album to be completed, with Clausen and Brauer constantly calling for more instruments, from accordion to flugelhorn, to be added to the mix. The limitless possibilities of recording digitally didn't do Efterklang any favours either.

“When you're working with a computer program, everything is possible. You can build upon it forever,” Clausen says. “You can keep messing it up.”

The album's highlight, “Caravan”, can hardly be faulted for its expansive arrangement. Constructed around tribal drum patterns and a one-note bass line, the song wildly weaves complex countermelodies through a cacophony of trombones, violins, and chanted verses, eventually winding down with a mélange of xylophones and wind chimes.

There are exceptions to Efterklang's rafter-reaching nature, however. The brilliantly brief instrumental “Mimeo” breathes just a couple of solemn piano chords before slipping into a serene moment of silence. Though it's a rarity, the track proves the band does know how to restrain itself in the studio.

“At some point you're standing at the window, smoking a cigarette and listening to the song playing in the background, and you just realize it's finished,” Clausen says, before offering a less romantic interpretation of his recording habits: “Either that or you simply say ‘Enough is enough!' ”

Ready to put Parades in the past, Efterklang, along with violinist Peter Broderick, pianist Heather Woods Broderick, and guitarist Daniel James, will be working on and testing out a handful of newer songs on its current tour. Writing outside of the studio is a foreign concept to the overdub-addicted Danes.

“We're trying to do something completely opposite of what we've done before,” Clausen explains.

Though travelling with a septet of musical multitaskers—Mølgaard will be sitting this one out—can hardly be called minimalist, Clausen feels hashing out the tunes on tour without a massive orchestra or a spacious hard drive will bring Efterklang closer to the simpler direction it's striving for.

“There's a saying in Danish that you have to get over the fence where it's highest, instead of at its lowest,” he says philosophically. “Sometimes it's only after a decade of time that you can jump over the fence.”

Efterklang plays the Media Club on Friday (March 6).