Nevermind the fact that “Starálfur” is about Jónsi meeting an elf: this is a band capable of emotional complexity that makes any language barrier meaningless.
This moment is legitimately awe-inspiring in a way that modern music rarely gets to be I’ve been listening to this album long enough that I have its name tattooed onto me, but this moment makes my breath catch in my chest every single time I hear it. On “Starálfur,” the heart-swelling strings and twinkling piano fade out leaving just Jónsi and his acoustic guitar, sounding like the end of the song, before a surge pulls you back into the song’s expanse. Post-rock often concerns itself with peaks and valleys, but for Sigur Rós, it’s more fun to be crafty with it. This is our first taste of the playful ebb and flow that the band masters with this record. At five minutes, everything but he and twinkling bells remain-a false sense of security before, just after the six-minute mark, Ágúst comes back, his soft patter ramping up before being joined by blaring organs, Jónsi’s voice working to match the new sound levels, before drifting back to dance along with his guitar whalesong. Drummer Ágúst Ævar Gunnarsson keeps a gentle pace as Jónsi coos softly in Icelandic, enough to let you drift off to sleep. We’re light-years from the brooding Sigur Rós of Von, left in a territory that feels weightless. From the get-go, Ágætis really feels capable of changing our understanding of music.Īs the dreamy, backmasked “Intro” fades out, a dull rumble and occasional radar ping remain, ushering us gently into “Svefn-g-englar,” Jónsi’s cello bowed guitar sounds like the song of a sea creature of immense size. If Von is the “Dawn of Man” sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ágætis represents the moment where the bone being thrown in the air cuts to an orbiting satellite. Von is screechy and strange, featuring many moments of difficult sparseness. Listening in hindsight, there were moments of grandeur, but nothing that you could grab onto in order to predict what would happen next. To really get it, you need to go back to Von, their debut. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who could listen to it and not know it is utterly remarkable.
So, what makes Ágætis so special, so unique? Honestly, everything. In advance of the album’s release, frontperson and guitarist Jónsi (Jón Þór Birgisson) made a bold claim: “We are simply gonna change music forever, and the way people think about music.” The thing is, though, he wasn’t entirely wrong-it may not have had the widespread impact he’d cheekily hoped for, but the fact that the album’s cover is adorned with an ethereal, glowing drawing of an angel fetus in utero feels like the visual manifestation of what Ágætis was able to accomplish.
To label Ágætis byrjun, the sophomore album by the Icelandic quartet, as merely “good”- worse, if you prefer the alternate translation “An Alright Start”-feels like the grandest understatement in the history of modern music. “ A Good Beginning.” Sigur Rós should face some kind of lawsuit for false advertising that blatant.
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