#SIGUR ROS AGAETIS BYRJUN ALBUM ARCHIVE#
2019 marks the 20th anniversary of the landmark Ágætis Byrjun and the band celebrates the occasion with a double heavyweight vinyl LP reissue complete with a download for demo and archive versions of all songs on the album, plus never-before-heard newly unearthed material from the era, rare B-sides and the full 95 minute concert played in Reykjavík on the day the record was released in 1999. The record label projected the album to sell 1,500 copies - it has to date sold several million copies. No one thought an album by an unknown band of four shy Icelandic men in their early-20s, singing in Icelandic, would become the worldwide music phenomenon it became. Agaetis Byrjun was an album that came literally out of nowhere and seemed to tug at the heartstrings of those who least expected it. In 1999 Sigur Ros released Ágætis Byrjun ("A Good Start") which Q Magazine went on to deem "the last great record of the 20th century." By the end of the year it had won the inaugural US Shortlist Prize for Artistic Achievement in Music. 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.Vinyl LP pressing. Upon first hearing it, I thought I might never need to listen to another album ever again. A nice enough band if you have them on in the background, but not entertaining or enjoyable enough to really sit down and listen to. Before I heard this, I thought they were nice but ultimately quite dull. Ágætis Byrjun is an album that demands to be played loudly, outdoors, and in moments of quiet introspection. Agaetis byrjun is the reason I like Sigur Ros. 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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