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June 2, 2005
sigur ros
these will get more current, for sure - for now, my rationale is 'if they're gonna be out of date, they may as well be quality'. proceed at will.
trivium: i'm seeing these guys for the first time in august! drooool ...
Agaetis Byrjun
SIGUR ROS
For anyone with even a slightly experimental bent, Sigur Ros' sophomore CD Agaetis Byrjun is a landmark album. Now six years old, it marked the arrival of a powerful new musical force, whose esoteric background and approach would see them morph into a quasi-mythical live and listening experience, almost the Kaiser Sose (qv. The Usual Suspects) of indie/ambient rock.
But it is only rock in the sense of its bombast and dynamics. Trying to describe the kind of aural magic this Icelandic trio weave often devolves into a surfeit of superlatives vaguely (and often ineffectively) combining drug references (usually downers), a snatch of LP-esque travelogue about the influence of the trio's volcanic-atoll home linked to their apparent sense of musical 'space' and some lip-service to the brilliant compositional device of singing in an entirely constructed, synthetic language mostly of their own invention.
Which is about as close as you can get, really; Sigur Ros are, depending on your viewpoint, beatific barbiturate lullaby-sculptors whose songs resonate in fictional time and melodic frameworks that evoke ethereal or dreamlike-states, or, less forgivingly, Yanni for the Pitchfork set. For mine, there is no real alternative to gushing when it comes to Sigur Ros - they are grandiose, visionary, perhaps a bit pretentious, but unquestionably amazing.
Imagine Portishead's understanding of beat and chilled groove crossed with Radiohead's use of dynamics and timbres, coupled with celestial, falsetto-driven vocals, droning guitars that sound like Martian whale-creatures crooning their mating songs from under layers of millennial ice ... you're nearly there.
Guitarist/vocalist Jonsi glisses drone-notes from his axe with a cello bow, a la Jimmy Page, but the similarity ends there; the signal is run through so many effects that the resulting sound simply doesn't appear to be coming from a guitar. Or this planet.
Their super high production values warrant further investigation alone: from subbie-wobbling lows (check out the segue between tracks 2 and 3) to the most shimmery high strings and brass, it's all there, gloriously balanced. The various members' backgrounds contribute to the startling sense of chiaroscuro - classical/chamber music, metal, doof/electro sonic palettes - all are reflected in the rococo compositions. Whether employing trad instrumentation or filtering over-compressed drum loops to the point of squelchy obviousness in pro-tools, the Sigur Ros touch is analogous to the meticulous attention of a master painter painstakingly mixing her 17th shade of red to get the subtleties juuuuuust right. Then flinging it with adrenalised abandon at the canvas.
And that fictional language. Referred to as 'Hopelandish' it's an amalgam of an old/faded Icelandic dialect and snatches of synthetic syllables deployed as, primarily, another sound-set or instrument. This approach perfectly complements the music, rendering the lyrics unintelligible to even their countrymen. It's more genius than pretentious in the same way that a mono photo can be more evocative than a colour pic for triggering memory; because detail is missing, a more active investment is required of the listener to 'colour in' the meaning, filling it with a personally-invested significance, making the overall whole more powerfully resonant for the highly individualised interpretations made possible.
Highlights are the thunderous Ny Batteri (New Batteries), the hopelessly addictive Svefn G Englar (Talk And Sleepers) with its mesemerising morphine mantra that sounds oddly like "it's you ..." cyclically, deliciously repeated over a descending bass and organ figure that gets down to subterranean depths, and the majestic, soaring Staralfur. Closer Avalon (no, not the Bryan Ferry track) and the similarly cyclonic Olsen Olsen are pure, strings-driven combustion.
You won't have heard this in any chart, though it might have made up the bed-track for some news piece on the ABC or BBC where some progressive young thing building their production reel got to bring their own music collection into the studio as the sonic backdrop for a story. In fact, keeping with this theme, 'cinematic' is the single adjective that best sums up Sigur Ros' ouevre: when considered in comparison to much of the music about in the noughties, the charts are dog-food jingle-ads next to this Wong Kar Wai epic-romance.
Despite their groundswell of indie-approval in the UK and Europe (they've opened tours for Radiohead, among others - these days their own shows are spoken of in reverential whispers), the only place you're likely to truly hear them is in your pumping, bloody heart.
In fact, if you can't hear the bewitching mystery in the music these guys purvey, you may not even have one.
Essential.
Posted by reuben at June 2, 2005 12:22 AM