Sigur Rós - Sigur Rós
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Free Music Notes for Sigur Rós
Free Music Review: Acquired Taste
Hit: 5 Stars
Such an acquired taste as sigur ros is so often overlooked. I almost overlooked it myself. I was exposed to their second (arguably 3rd) CD (ageatis byrjun) a few months after it came out by a freind and i must admit it wasnt my favorite sound. However, a few months to a year later i fell in love with the album and sigur ros as a whole. I couldnt get their pseudo religous and otherwordly rythms out of my head. Their music now is more important to me than any other music ( and i do listen to quite a lot of music). Since i had acquired this love for music from people i had never met, from a place i have only dreamed about, i was more than psyced about the realease of this new album (())[sorry, i couldnt resist the utter nonsense in putting the album title in parentheses]. I quickly pre-ordered the cd when i first saw it on this website... i jsut recently obtained this piece of heaven and was more than dissapointed when i received the album and was shocked at how little it meant to me and that i couldnt beleive how un-moving the cd was. However, as i listened to it more and more i realized the complexity that could never be heard on first listen and how i had felt that way about their last album. As i listen to the cd now i can describe in words what i am feeling...the cd takes you not to another world they have created, but to one of your own. The absence of actual lyrics opens the gates to a self created heaven and not one created by some godly beings from another world. I feel as though i am taking from them when i listen to the cd and imagine another world and another place.As for the teknikal aspects: the closest thing i can compare the casing to is tool's lateralus... it has a white sleave with a hole that creates the () logo on front and a picture of a zombie like person walking o' so frankensteinishly on back ...and underneath there is a black and white picture that you see above (within the () logo). Within the cd is a semi-permeable booklet of similar pictures. The acual cd is full white with the () logo texteured on it.
The songs are all unexplainably beautiful and must be heard and not talked about. however, i could understand how someone could not like sigur ros at all. There music is far from "for everyone", the overall rating on this album is probably far from acurate on the average persons take on the album... almost everyone that has heard sigur ros loves them. however this number is few.
In all this cd is an acquiered taste that takes a little work and patients to understand (like the best things in life, for example: love). this cd is not a plyable backdrop that just displays the portrait of gut music, but is much deeper and takes us back to a time when music took actual feeling and talent (classical era).But i must reiderate that this cd is not for everyone, it is an intravert's wet dream... however it is only my opinion.. in the ambiguous words of thom yorke:
"i might be wrong"
Free Music Review: Poetry in sound.
Hit: 5 Stars
( ) comes with no song titles, no lyrics, no mention of band members or the instruments they play. There are vocals, but no actual words. There are no production credits. There are only blank pages with the faint image of haggard tree branches and bushes. The intention of this approach is to strip the focus away from everything but the music. The band's previous album, _Agaetis Byrjun_, was a more accessible and upfront work with lush orchestrations. ( ) takes a different direction and strips the music down to more earthly compositions, yet it remains reverent and holy
The openness of ( ) feels to me like it is my creation just as much as it is Sigur Ros'. The music is the inkwell, but the listener is the poet, scribing one's own fable to Sigur Ros' winter phantasmagoria. From the time when Play is pushed onward, the world evaporates into a monochromatic vista that slowly billows over the real world. The frosty tone of the music is as visceral as winter's listless sigh, but it is not an unpleasant cold -- it is more like a warming chill from a lover's breath across bare skin, or a sip of searing coffee after a long time out in the cold. (Dallis Bros., not Starbucks.) The vocals are radiant, wordless in a manner recalling the Cocteau Twins -- a ghostly, androgynous falsetto that could make every withered tendril on the snowy canvass flourish with vitality. Songs build and shift with at a glacial pace, and yet everything seems to end far too quickly.
I can't discuss individual tracks because I've never paid attention to where one ends and one begins. The album is split into two parts, each four tracks long. To me, the ( represents the hopeful and heartening side, replete with beautiful pianos, each note evoking the crystalline tears shed at a hero's funeral, at once elegiac and uplifting. The second half is a flowing epic that languidly builds, passionately culminating in the last 15-20 minutes. This second part, the ), grows darker as it goes, like the sunset. Like the sunset, it is beautiful. As dark falls, a feeling of uncertainty seeps into the music, but a defiant vocal keeps the aura of warmth strong. The encroaching darkness mounts with thundering percussion, threatening to overwhelm the vocals entirely, but they remain resistant and brave and powerful, until the final moment when everything fades away.
Okay, so this review isn't much good in hindsight. You probably have no idea what it sounds like if you're going solely by what I have said (except that it evokes images of winter). Still, ( ) is so subjectively defined (not just in terms of quality), so I just described what it is to me.
If you want to die with a smile on your face, play ( ) during your final moments. What a wonderful album. I was still new to Sigur Ros when ( ) rolled along (having just picked up Agaetis Byrjun a few months before). Whatever expectations I had, this album surpassed them in every way. The most beautiful album I have ever heard.
Free Music Review: beautiful and inexorable
Hit: 5 Stars
The first thing you notice about this album is the beautiful packaging and the fact that, when you open it up, you see the liner notes are ten pages of blank paper. Well, not quite blank: because given the absence of any text the faint designs on the paper, which otherwise you would have dismissed as part of the stationary, become a sort of minimalist art themselves; and each page is different, once you start looking closely enough. Which is of course a metaphor for the album's music itself. Not only is there no 'real' album title and no track titles at all, all the songs are sung in 'Hopelandic' so I don't think there's anyone in the world who'll get distracted by the lyrics. Instead, you have to just close your eyes and sit back and listen to the music slowly wash over you. And it is slow--none of the albums songs is any faster than around 70 beats per minute. But even with that slowness, and with the fact that what development the songs do have is so gradual as to be practically imperceptible, you'll find yourself looking up to find that three tracks and twenty minutes have passed by, without you noticing. That's how absorbing these tunes are.Of course, not everybody'll like em. The difference between each of the eight tracks on the album isn't, to the superficial ear, that much more than the difference between the 'blank' pages in the liner notes--'drop the needle' on the middle of each song and you'll most likely hear Jónsi Birgisson singing something that sounds like 'you sigh.' And if you're distracted the music can easily slip into the background and become something like sonic wallpaper, since it doesn't have a single pop hook to keep you in.
But when you're willing to actually listen, it's that absence of hooks that makes the music so beautiful and engaging. Despite Sigur Rós' 'orchestral' characteristics, they don't rely on dramatic crescendos and orchestral bombast (well not much) to get their point across. Instead the key to their music is nothing more than the inexorable progression of their chords: it's not all obvious, and few of the chords are quite what one might expect, but it each one has an undeniable 'rightness' to it. The only thing I can think to compare it to is the music of Albert Ayler--he obviously played in a completely different style, but his bands had a way of setting up tensions and resolutions in their music that, despite their avant-garde setting, seemed to tap into something at the very heart of how we understand music. And Sigur Ros is the same way. The comparisons with the glaciers and volcanoes of Iceland get overdone, but it's impossible not to see why they arise. The music in ( ) does seem to share something with those primal forces, like it's less created than revealed. And it's really good. Check this album out.
Free Music Review: a bit closer to heaven
Hit: 5 Stars
when i bought this CD i feared, like many artists with a beautiful premiere album, that Sigur Rós would not be able to follow up to the talent or the anticipation resulting from the success of their first album. i am glad they proved me wrong. this album is one of the most beautiful things i have ever been graced to be able to listen to. from the first track's slow piano progression escalating ever so slowly to make your heart crave what is coming next, to the much anticipated studio version of "Njósnavélin" (track 04, previously heard in the rooftop scene in "Vanilla Sky"), this track especially, damn near made me weep, and almost now as i listen to "Njósnavélin" as i write this. the album has been attacked as "not going anywhere" or of being a bit "monotonous," and i disagree highly with these petty suspicions. the beauty and complexity of taking a single synth wave and transforming, transmitting, manipulating, filtering, and layering it to achieve the highest emotional response from the listener is anything but lazy or boring. even if the organisation of the song appears simple on its surface, sometimes the saying holds true that "simplicity is key," and the true art is just knowing how to utilise it. from the first track pushing a basic slow piano riff through your ears, to the throbbing bass lines in the track three, simplicity truly is key in this album. the sounds, synths, keys and drums all ebb and flow like an ocean tide, pure and effortless and yet beautiful all at the same time. sometimes complexity and intelligence are achieved by mere simplicity; but really, how easy is it to make songs that can grab and tug at your soul with their melancholy and somber keys repeating, repeating, repeating, and repeating, taking you further and further into a dark, quiet, and peaceful mental state? sure, the CD may not go anywhere in aspects of having a traditional Verse Chorus Verse layout, but that is the point. this disc makes the listener feel as if they are hovering, enwrapped in audio, as things become a bit louder, a bit harder, a bit harsher, a bit more emotional, everything becoming a bit more intense, and refusing to let you retreat. the songs use elements of sound that tremble, vibrate, roar, and ripple through your conscious, and unconscious, mind. you feel you have lost touch with the outside world as you listen to this CD tear through you, when in fact you have gone nowhere. however, thanks to the beautiful ambient noises, slow piano keys, hurting vocals, and brush drum kits, and the overall "simplicity" exhibited in this disc by Sigur Rós, you feel you have left the world around you, drowned in your own thoughts.if you have ever appreciated beauty in any form, you will love this CD.
you will love this CD.
Free Music Review: Please, listen to this!
Hit: 5 Stars
I only know about Sigur ros from other amazon reviewers going completely crazy about this band from iceland. i've seen this album in countless listmania lists and on its own page, there are more than 200 reviews! gee what have i been missing here??? plus one of the reviewers mentioned that the booklet had only blank pages with NOTHING printed on them! i'm a designer so this intrigued me even more and when i saw the album at a local music store i literally jumped at it. now i'm expecting a lot from this band because i rarely buy something without any previous knowledge or hearing. after repeated listens (i listened to it for 5 times in one day and now it's been a week that i've been listening to it) i can say i'm so glad to have this album in my collection; right from the first track (all 8 cuts are untitled and have a total running time of 72 minutes), the sad and mellow tune freezes you to wherever you are. i personally closed my eyes and didnt make a move, not wanting to spoil this moment, totally forgetting that this is a cd that i could replay for as much as i wanted ! i'm glad noone witnessed my dumb trance when i listened to this. vocals are dreamy and blurry and i could hardly comprehend what the singer was saying; his voice seemed more like an instrument complementing the coherent whole of all other instruments. pianos produce simple minimalistic harmonies repeated and enhanced by keyboards that first are bearly heard but which gradually build up into walls of soaring majesty, magnificently blending with the pianos. the most amazing example of what i'm talking about is track 3 (my favorite); a recurring piano tune, so gripping that you never want to hear it end. i think these guys just showed us the meaning of the word "cohesive". every remaining track goes on to unfurl into an 8-9 minute long mini-symphony that is simply delightful.
this is not a happy album; some reviewers spoke of 'hope' .
i could mostly sense the melancholy and sadness but only glimpses of hope, shimmering here and there, mostly through added background vocals.
the last 2 tracks show a more proggish approach than in the beginning of the album where minimalism is most stricking and guitars were far less present; these last tracks remind me briefly of old pink floyd epics like "shine on you crazy diamond" or early marillion; i still havent decided if there is a weak track on this album because frankly they all seem to range from 'good' to 'jaw dropping' and i'm going to look for 'agaethis byrjun' which also seems to be another gem by these very talented artists. you owe it to yourself to check out this album if you're into plain, meaningful music you can feel in your inmost depths.