Sigur Rós' subsequent album, ( ), used Vonlenska exclusively for its vocals. The strings in "Starálfur" are palindromic they are the same forwards and backwards.Īll vocals are sung in Icelandic, except for those on "Olsen Olsen" and the last section of the title track, which are sung in the gibberish language Vonlenska. The ten songs on the album include some self-reference: the introduction contains backmasked parts from the title track, and the last song, "Avalon", consists of a different take of an instrumental passage from "Starálfur" slowed to around a quarter of its original speed. Logo on the album cover in the font ShelleyAllegro BT Gunnarsson was replaced by Orri Páll Dýrason in the same year. Ágætis byrjun is the band's first album to feature keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, and their last to feature drummer Ágúst Ævar Gunnarsson, who left the band several months after the album was released. It won numerous awards, and has appeared on multiple critics' lists of the best albums of the 2000s. According to their label Smekkleysa, the album sold 10,000 copies on its first year of release in Iceland, earning the band platinum status. It received a 2000 release in the United Kingdom and a 2001 release in the United States. Ágætis byrjun became Sigur Rós's breakthrough album, both commercially and critically. Ágætis byrjun represented a substantial departure from the band's previous album Von, with that album's extended ambient soundscapes replaced by Jónsi Birgisson's cello-bowed guitarwork and orchestration, using a double string octet amongst other chamber elements. The album was recorded between the summer of 1998 and the spring of 1999 with producer Ken Thomas. So engrossing is the spell with which Sigur Rós work, so powerful is the scope of their vision, that post-rock or not, they’ve certainly created a sort of music unlike any that’s been made before.Ágætis byrjun ( Icelandic:, A good beginning) is the second studio album by Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós, released on 12 June 1999. Upon first hearing it, I thought I might never need to listen to another album ever again. Ágætis Byrjun is an album that demands to be played loudly, outdoors, and in moments of quiet introspection. Olsen Olsen drifts into solidity like a dream colliding with the waking world, and and the album closer, Avalon, seems to usher in the new century from a hillside ceremony. The opening measures of Hjartao Hamast seem genuinely out of place, sounding a bit like a Fender Rhodes and harmonica outtake from some lost Led Zeppelin session. Flugufrelsarinn features some devastatingly beautiful bowed guitar by Birgisson.The jubilation that comes toward the end of ny Batteri is unexpected and surprisingly heartbreaking. Staralfur is lush in its string orchestration. From there, the album careens and cascades through a scattershot portrait a world we’ve never known. The album opens with the sonar pings and tranquil liquidity of the subtly noisy Svefn-G-Englar, whose heartbeat ending is as close to a gradual passing from one world to the next as one could hope for. Birgisson often draws a cello bow across his guitar strings, and the drums are as often played with brushes as they are pounded and tape-looped like booted feet across a frozen tundra. Somewhere an acoustic guitar plunks clumsily and a horn section sounds the dawn. And in its epic runtime (over an hour) and its demand to be heard in full, Ágætis Byrjun is something of an anomaly in an increasingly singles-driven digital decade.Ī cathedral organ gives way to white noise and chamber-music string orchestrations. The music here is rich, lush, and intentional, while maintaining the sparse simplicity of a sun-washed hillside or a glacier’s path. All of this lends the music a sense of deeply religious fervor, an almost ceremonial elegance and solemnity.
And his lyrics are as often sung in his invented language, Hopelandish, as they are in any real tongue. Vocalist Jónsi Birgisson sounds like something ethereal – or perhaps like something sprung from the tender beginnings of the blue-inked angelic fetus that bizarrely graces the album’s cover. Their music sounds as though it’s existed since some time around the dawn of civilization while at once sounding completely new and unsullied by all this cinderblock modernity. Sigur Rós have been dubbed “post-rock” but that’s not really fair. Nothing you’ve ever heard before can prepare you for what’s contained in this sprawling collection of tracks. Iceland’s Sigur Rós have stated plainly their intent to “change music forever, and the way people think about music.” And with their second proper album, Ágætis Byrjun, they seem to be making good on their promise.
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