Agaetis Byrjun

Rolling Stone (1/4/01, p.116) - Included in Rolling Stone's "Top 50 Albums of 2000". Rolling Stone (9/28/00, p.61) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...The most bizzarely beautiful import from Iceland since Bjork..." Spin (1/01, p.73) - Ranked #13 in Spin's "Top 20 Albums of the Year [2000]". Spin (10/00, pp.177-8) - 8 out of 10 - "...All midnight-sun and bummed-Viking angst. Jon or Birgisson's lovely, breathless vocals glide over guitar clouds, and drums boom along at a languid pace as the songs slowly approach bliss-out..." Uncut - "[o]ne of Agaetis Byrjun's defining features is its unbound sense of optimism, the idea that pop music still had some way to go before surrendering its possibilities." Magnet (p.118) - "The album' mixture of cello-bowed guitar, sugar-frosted strings and heavenly human choruses would have a huge impact on tourmates Radiohead, whose ice-age anti-statement KID A remains indebted to this mini-masterpiece." CMJ (10/30/00, p.22) - "...Deep, almost primordial beauty....It doesn't get much more sublime than this." Mojo (Publisher) (p.58) - Ranked #70 in Mojo's "100 Modern Classics" -- "So captivatingly diffuse, AGAETIS BYRJUN sounds as though it was beamed in from 1,000 years ago." NME (Magazine) (12/30/00, p.79) - Ranked #35 in NME's "Top 50 Albums Of The Year" - "...The shoegazing soundtrack to frozen skies and magma flows..."

Two years passed since Sigur Ros' debut. By this time, the band recruited in a new keyboardist by the name of Kjartan Sveinsson and it seems to have done nothing but take the band to an even higher state of self-awareness. Even on aesthetic matters, Sigur Ros entitle their sophomore effort not in a manner to play up the irony of high expectations (a la the Stone Roses' Second Coming), but in a modest realization. This second album -- Agaetis Byrjun -- translates roughly to Good Start. So as talented as Von might have been, this time out is probably even more worthy of dramatic debut expectations. Indeed, Agaetis Byrjun pulls no punches from the start. After an introduction just this side of one of the aforementioned Stone Roses' backward beauties, the album pumps in the morning mist with "Sven-G-Englar" -- a song of such accomplished gorgeousness that one wonders why such a tiny country as Iceland can musically outperform entire continents in just a few short minutes. The rest of this full-length follows such similar quality. Extremely deep strings underpin falsetto wails from the mournfully epic ("Vidhar Vel Tl Loftarasa") to the unreservedly cinematic ("Avalon"). One will constantly be waiting to hear what fascinating turns such complex musicianship will take at a moment's notice. At its best, the album seems to accomplish everything lagging post-shoegazers like Spiritualized or Chapterhouse once promised. However, at its worst, the album sometimes slides into an almost overkill of sonic structures. Take "Hjartadh Hamast (Bamm Bamm Bamm)," for instance: there are so many layers of heavy strings, dense atmospherics, and fading vocals that it becomes an ineffectual mess of styles over style. As expected, though, the band's keen sense of Sturm und Drang is mostly contained within an elegant scope of melodies for the remainder of this follow-up. Rarely has a sophomore effort sounded this thick and surprising. Which means that "Good Start" might as well become of the most charming understatements to come out of a band in years. ~ Dean Carlson