This album is another one of those cases where maybe it would help to translate some of the words involved so I could understand the point of it better. I'll let the first few tracks play for themselves to see if it's worth it to learn what "Ágætis byrjun" means.
The second song is tailor made for a closing montage on a modern network drama. Think of how every episode of House MD or Cold Case closed with shots of the main cast doing paperwork, or going home after the tough case, or glancing meaningfully at a photograph while wispy emotional music played in the background. This is the song that played over all of them. OK, so it's not, but it very well could be. Except none of those montages were 10 minutes long. This song is. And it's the same slow boring descending organ progression for all 10 minutes. Zzzzzzzz...
Track 3 reminds me of Coldplay's most "powerful" sad songs. It's got that noodling piano and overwrought string orchestration with plenty of airy whining. I guess since I don't even know the name of this language the lyrics could be about tentacle rape and I'd still think it was the sappiest plate of tripe ever.
Sigur Ros, whether it's a he, a she, or a they, certainly does like the breathy, scratchy sound effects, because they show up between each song. What they don't like using is any sort of energy. I'm thinking of creating a new genre just for this album, and I want to call it "soft Euro-techno jazz." It's heavily electronic, very slow, and it feels like the band is just meandering around a small trace of melody. The fact that the lyrics are in (random guess) Norwegian gives me little grounding to follow the structure.
"Ný batterí" features such minimalist playing of brass instruments that they sound less like trumpets and more like someone wiping a wet rag across a squeaky pane of glass. The song does build to as rocking a conclusion as soft Euro-techno jazz music can really conjure, which is nice, but the song is mostly a 2-chord progression for nearly 8 minutes.
Credit where due: "Hjartað hamast (bamm bamm bamm)" (The Heart Pounds [boom boom boom]) is really fucking awesome. I'll have to grab that one for my collection. It's of similar mode with a droning minimalist progression that slowly builds up, but I really like how the underwriting beat and sound is very bluesy until the song kicks up with a deeply sorrow-filled orchestration. Excellent, beautiful, all those things.
It's follow-up "Viðrar vel til loftárása" (Good Weather for an Airstrike) is also quite nice, a gentle piano concerto that builds up the layers slowly. I just wish they had left it lyric-free. The lead singer has a very weak voice, and in this case they compound the problem by running him through a scratchy filter. I think Ágætis byrjun (A Good Beginning, turns out it was worth it to look it up) would be a much better instrumental band, and that's not just because I don't understand the words (which are in Icelandic apparently).
The momentum is spoiled by "Olsen Olsen" which goes back to the simple repeated two-note progression deal that goes on and on. This type of track is just filler. Well, most of the music is just filler because each track is nearly 8 minutes long, which is just uncalled for with the low complexity of most of this material.
I wound up liking 2 songs, but that's not really enough for me to like the whole album. There was way too little going on for the length to be justified. It was an interesting listen but a long and slow one. I looked up the band and was baffled to discover they are classified in the "post-rock" genre. Well, this music certainly doesn't rock, but that's still an odd descriptor. I would think anything that's "post" rock music would need to arrive in the void that rock left behind in order to fill it. Rock music is pretty disappointing today, but it's hardly dead, and it certainly won't be replaced by weak crud like Sigur Rós.
I mean, it is interesting, and very beautiful in it's stronger parts. You probably should hear it before you die. You just probably won't like it very much. 2 stars.
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