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Befitting its amorphous name, post-rock was a product of several disparate genres: art rock (Talk Talk), post-hardcore (Slint), krautrock and electronica (Tortoise), drone (Godspeed You! Black Emperor). Indeed, Ágætis byrjun was a quantum leap from Von, but it also sounded worlds away from much of what was happening within the realm of post-rock in the ‘90s. It seemed a promising name for the song, and the album it would be a part of. Upon hearing the song, a friend of the band called it just that: “a good beginning.” Ágætis byrjun. If the sonic change of pace felt like an attempt to distance the new song from its predecessors, the lyrics (loosely translated) made the band’s attitude toward their past work clear:
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The first song they finished for the yet-untitled album marked a break from the murky shoegaze of Von, sounding more like a cosmic country ballad with acoustic guitar and piano. It was around this time that Sigur Rós began work on their sophomore record. (In lieu of payment, they painted the recording studio.) One year after its release, Von hadn’t even sold out its initial pressing of 500, with virtually no copies sold outside of Iceland. You almost certainly didn’t know that their 1997 debut, Von (“hope”) in 1997, was a Cocteau Twins-esque dream pop album that the band only released because they didn’t have the means to re-record it. If you knew one thing about them in the early 2000s, you knew that they came from Iceland, not outer space if you knew two things, you knew that Radiohead liked them so much that they brought them on tour. To the uninitiated, Sigur Rós might well have been aliens themselves. It is as if it is preserved in amber, or like the alien fetus on the cover, in amniotic fluid. The CD that I burned the album from, the Barnes & Noble where I bought it, and the iPod Classic that I listened to it on are relics of the past now, but Ágætis byrjun’s timeless beauty feels as timeless as ever. Listening to the album when it was released in 1999 must have felt like watching a meteorite landing at your feet that’s how it felt when I first heard it on a cold night in January 2012, sitting at my kitchen table, leafing through an AP U.S.
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In fact, it seems to exist outside of space and time-it is, as far as I can tell, not extraterrestrial so much as it is extradimensional. Ágætis byrjun just turned 20 yesterday-and with an anniversary reissue on the way-but it might as well have come to us from 20 years in the future.
#SIGUR RÓS ÁGÆTIS BYRJUN FULL#
It’s the first holy shit moment on an album full of holy shit moments. And then someone takes a cello bow to an electric guitar, producing a sound that’s as crushing as a waterfall yet as caressing as velvet. What you’ve heard up until that point is alluring, but slight-a piano in reverse, sighing vocals, a glowing keyboard, a subdued tone that sounds like it’s emanating from underwater, like the sonar pulse of a submarine. Three minutes after you drop the needle on Sigur Rós‘ masterpiece, Ágætis byrjun, something magical happens.