How to prepare the uninitiated (SR buffs are fond of comparing ‘first times’) for the album with no name ( ) ?
After the masterpiece that was Ágætis Byrjun – their second
album – this at first seems to lack that album’s glorious versatility.
( ) is a less faceted construct – less ambitious in some respects. Rather
than continue to explore, to break yet more new ground, it’s as if Sigur
Rós have decided to consolidate for a while, with the result that this
album seems almost wilfully monothematic. Quite apart from its almost disdainful
refusal to assist (no title, minimal artwork, no tracklist, no notes, no lists
of which genius twiddled which knobs on which track), there’s no avoiding
the explicit metaphysical challenge contained in the awkward space between
those blunt parentheses: make of this what you will – only the music
matters. And – especially – don’t try to make sense of the
lyrics, which are in neither English nor Icelandic, but in what they call
Hopelandic (except that’s a translation of an Icelandic word with ‘von’
in it, which means ‘hope’) – which is, I suppose, the equivalent
of those fine folk from Hope (that’s west of Faith, north-east of Charity)
crooning too-ra-lei-lo as they jig around the burning wicker man. Neo-folk,
actually, has been used to describe what they do, along with slo-core, electro-ambient,
post-rock, and similar epithets as applied to the likes of Mogwai and Low,
although if we’re looking for provenance, I’d suggest going further
back – via Cocteau Twins – to Pink Floyd and (yes, even so) the
Beatles, if not further still to Palestrina and Machaut (do I hype or do I
hype?) And lead singer Jónsi Birgisson’s eerily sensual falsetto
is the closest any of us is going to get (in this life, at least) to the experience
of cowering by the gates to the underworld whilst some scary shaman simultaneously
invokes and placates the even more scary gatekeepers.
Sigur Rós is a majorly divisive band in that there do exist one or
two lost souls who find them irritatingly sanctimonious. You don’t have
to be into Bhutto and Tarkovsky’s movies to like them, but it helps.
Track 5, for example, must stand out, tempo-wise, as one of the most attenuated
in musical history (is it possible for a
drummer to drum more slowly than this without disappearing for a pee between
beats?) – but as long as it evokes the images that it does - in my case,
vast white spaces, shimmering with immanence, sadness, yearning, illuminated
by the faintest peripheral flashes of a kind of stubborn optimism (tell me
about it) – this glacier-like slowness is the completely appropriate
dynamic adjunct, no more, no less. And if this makes them sound a bit New
Age-y and whalesong-by-moonlight, think again: the final track here, which
begins as rhapsodically as the rest, builds to an absolutely astonishing climax
that would meet the approval of the hardest-core Iron Maiden nut, and has
blisters erupting on your fingers in sympathy for goggi
the bass.
If all poetry aspires to the condition of music, then all music aspires to
the condition of silence. Sigur Rós have already begun flirting with
that nirvana-like silence which all music post-Cage was supposed to address.
The ‘18 seconds before dawn’ of their first album, ‘Von’,
is here extended to a prolonged 30-second demarcation zone between the album’s
two ‘sides’. Some will say this is just another example of the creeping
trend to nostalgic digital vinylisation. I say it doesn’t take half a
minute to turn a record over.
Listen. What
do you hear?
