Ágætis byrjun

by

Sigur Rós

Edit

With nearly 300 reviews of this CD already written, and no one but the most deranged fan willing to read more than a few, why add another? Well, because I suspect there are listeners other than myself who look and listen and wonder how to decipher all the woozy praise or hysterical hatred. Besides, of course, buying the darn thing and listening.

I have been a fan of Sigur Ros for over 4 years, having been exposed to them by my daughter, who thought this right up my alley. And she was blindingly right. I have witnessed them twice live. This is amazing stuff. Now, not everything they do is amazing....some of it is rather pedestrian. Tedious. A little embarrassing. Even Mozart wrote uninteresting music. But there is nothing dull on this CD. It is transcendent and intoxicating. Their consistently best work to date.

I do not believe snippets or scraps can really capture what this can do. You need to immerse yourself into the world they create, a sonic palace of bizarre digital noises and weird little drones, a wispy little vocalist and a breathtakingly brilliant percussionist, and savor it all. Unlike anything else, and unrelated to anything else, it stands on its own as something worth experiencing and enjoying.

Sigur Ros is like a Jackson Pollack painting. Often when you look at a Pollack, not a print but the real thing, you wonder what the heck he thought he was up to. He got paid for that? But sometimes Pollack hit it perfectly; he took the same old swirls and drips and spatters on every painter's dropcloth and produced something gorgeous and permanent. This CD has all winners on it, a flow and a movement using the the most elementary, and often most repetitive, little sounds and weaving and blending them into a tapestry of endlessly surprising and often unimaginable beauty.

I'm sorry.

Did I rate it 1 star? I meant 5.

Curious to see on what grounds something so directly and obviously beautiful as this CD could be disliked, I scanned all the negative reviews here to date. Aside from the one respectable negative reviewer--from Iceland--who simply and honestly declared that he "just doesn't get it," I noticed a rather amusing pattern. Intriguingly, there is the nearly universal employment of the word "pretentious" somewhere in the review. This is coupled with the nearly universal pretentiousness of the negative reviews (endless namedropping, amateurish "rock-reviewer" posing, and even some music "biz" kibbitzing, as if they were addressing a stockholder's meeting). The earliest negative review is the paradigm: Devon Reed manages to use the adjective "pretentious"--without irony--in a review that not only contains a quote from Pauline Kael, but attempts to coin the idiotic word "overwhelmingness." I can think of few more pretentious exercises than to dress up one's gut dislike for a work of art with bloated prose about "influences" and solemn pronouncements on the state of contemporary music.

The verdict seems clear: if you are a pretentious--that's right, pretentious--would-be rock critic who has spent years cultivating a refined musical dyspepsia as a replacement for ears, and whose tastes serve as a pseudointellectual identity badge entitling you to whine about people who find beauty where you don't, then stay away from Sigur Ros. You know who you are, and you paradoxically risk a dangerous blood-pressure spike whenever you listen to anything deliberately tranquil. However, if you are just about any other stripe of human, there's a good chance you'll be pleasantly hypnotized by this simply beautiful CD.