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Angels of the Un-Verse:
Talk about foreigners over coffee and toast with Icelanders on a windy summer morning in Reykjavik — when your body thinks it’s breakfast-time but the sun thinks it’s noon — and the conversation will eventually turn to faeries. "An American woman came over here last summer looking for spirits, elves, that sort of thing," one will say, smiling knowingly at his countrymen. "Someone sold her a rock and told her it had a faerie in it. She talked to it; she even took it home with her!" Everyone will laugh, loudest of all the urbane, modern Icelanders. So amusing, the romantic notions held by silly tourists. But then you’ll read in your guidebook that Iceland’s Public Roads Administration regularly calls in experts on trolls, spirits, and otherworldly beings, lest construction disturb the fragile homes of these "hidden folk." And you’ll learn that during the 1970s, a medium negotiated a deal between highway officials and some elves who happened to live in a mountain slated for blasting. So quaint, the lingering Nordic superstitions of remote island outposts. The mystery behind that contradiction may help explain why Sigur Ros is the perfect Icelandic band. Their sophomore album, Agaetis Byrjun, was finally released in the United States last month, nearly two years after its near-seismic success in Iceland and nine months after it seeped into American music stores as a hard-to-find British import. The band made numerous magazines’ "best of" lists last year, they just wrapped up a North American tour, and they’re even being trumpeted by the likes of Napster. But good luck figuring out what Sigur Ros is really all about; you’ll sooner find a faerie on an Icelandic lava field. Of course, the bare facts are out there on the Internet for anyone to find. Lead singer Jon Thor Birgisson, known to friends and fans alike as Jonsi, sometimes plays his guitar with a bow. The band’s name means "Victory Rose," which is also the name of Jonsi’s 8-year-old sister, and the title of Agaetis Byrjun means something like "a decent beginning" or "an OK start." All of Sigur Ros’s recordings to date have been sung entirely in Icelandic, except for a few that may or may not have been sung in a made-up dialect known as "Hopelandic." And the music? Earnest and ambitious, it defies easy description, but you’ll find it either soul-stirring and profound or trite and pretentious, depending on your tolerance for the marriage of pop and New Age. Sigur Ros practices what has been aptly called "musical landscaping," starting with a few random aural elements and adding instrumental layers until the whole thing builds, with drowsy certainty, to a decisive crescendo. Jonsi’s eerie, whispered falsetto haunts the organ-drone of songs like "svefn-g-englar" ("sleepwalkers") and overwhelms the lonely brass arrangements of "ny batteri" ("new batteries"). Songs like "olsen olsen" are positively trance-inducing, a pleasant major-key tapestry of musical optimism; you may even find yourself wanting to sing along in your own made-up Icelandic dialect. The same holds true for the album’s inscrutable title track, which may be a love song, or a lullaby, or something else. Whatever it is, it’s a nicely crafted little pop tune — a decent beginning indeed. But the languid, 21st-century lullabies of Sigur Ros strike their share of jarring notes. Sometimes the effect is stirring, such as on "staralfur" ("staring elf"), when a pretty string melody punctuated by synthesizer notes drops you into a crudely recorded acoustic guitar riff only to jolt you back into a rush of lush electronic sound. Elsewhere on the album such tricks serve only as a disappointing reminder of artifice, evidence that Sigur Ros is trying too hard to pull a heartstring or two. A ridiculous rocket-launch sound effect concludes "hjartad hamast (bamm bamm bamm)" ("the heart pounds, boom boom boom"), while the lonely, unsubtle wind blowing throughout "vidrar vel til loftarasa" ("good weather for airstrikes") is better suited to a 1980s anti-war pop-song than a breezy Icelandic anthem. Many of the songs of Agaetis Byrjun will lodge in the back of your mind for days like a tiny lava pebble, prompting you to return for another listen long after you think you’ve made up your mind about this strange album. "avalon," an unnecessary four minutes of barely audible droning that ends the album, is not likely to be among them. Most reviews of Agaetis Byrjun have been drenched with hyperbole. Declaring that the music of Sigur Ros was "the sound of God weeping tears of gold in Heaven," the British magazine Melody Maker even gushed that "your life is empty without them." On the other hand, Sigur Ros has also prompted some criticism for seeking to engage listeners’ hearts while perhaps bypassing their minds. But unlike Erik Satie, the French composer who invented "furniture music" in the 1920s and reportedly once ran around a party begging people not to listen to his compositions, Sigur Ros doesn’t want fans to bliss out unthinkingly to its ethereal Icelandic hymns. "These people are here to drink and meet people, and we don’t make background music for that," bass player Georg Holm recently commented to a New York Times Magazine editor in a Reykjavik club. Despite composing intangible melodies with incomprehensible lyrics, Sigur Ros is looking for an intellectual response to its baffling songs — and not just among Icelandic speakers. "We are not a band, we are music," the band collectively told the Sydney Morning Herald in an oft-quoted sound bite. "We do not intend to become superstars or millionaires, we are simply gonna change music forever, and the way people think about music." Now, if you spent your teenage years creeping your way through "Dark Side of the Moon" on headphones with the light dimmed, Sigur Ros may not strike you as entirely revolutionary. Their moody, ambient craftwork of repetitive sounds, haunting vocals, and electronic wizardry is as beholden to light doses of secondhand serialism as to decades of pop-music abstraction. Critical comparisons to bands that construct similar walls of musical emotion, such as Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Radiohead, are legion, and suggest that Sigur Ros is simply the latest bunch of European lads to toy with a great deal of expensive sound equipment. But there’s something uniquely Icelandic about Agaetis Byrjun that makes Sigur Ros a bit more intriguing than many of their peers. That something, rooted in the language barrier that sends foreign fans scrambling for a search engine, is the band’s insistence on singing in a language that’s unintelligible to all but about 300,000 of the world’s six billion people — a deliberate but benevolent insularism that any observant visitor to Iceland is likely to notice almost immediately as a widespread national characteristic. Although Iceland abounds with daily newspapers, an English-speaking foreigner who doesn’t understand the ancient, highly inflected Icelandic language has only one real source, the Daily News From Iceland Web site, for scant information about the country and its culture. Any travel guidebook will inform you that Iceland has had more chess grandmasters per capita than any other nation; that the highly literate Icelanders publish more books per capita than nearly anywhere else; and that Iceland is a leader in geothermal power. All of that is common knowledge, little in dispute and a perfectly proud global reputation for a little island on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Still, you’ll need a candid Icelander to tell you that young, single mothers are worrying their elders a bit more these days, or that many Icelanders are increasingly concerned about the teenage alcoholism so evident in the revelries beneath Reykjavik’s extended summer dusk. Despite appearances, Icelanders aren’t out to misrepresent their culture or hide their social problems from the rest of the world; knowledge of the truest details of life in Reykjavik is simply the purview of those who understand Icelandic, a language whose foreign, non-native speakers rarely include anyone beyond visiting volcanologists or a few dedicated medieval scholars.
Of course, this respectable cultural taciturnity doesn’t help international comprehension of Sigur Ros songs, nor is it useful that one fan Web site has removed its translations of lyrics at the band’s request. It seems the members of Sigur Ros want to translate the lyrics to Agaetis Byrjun themselves, to keep the renderings "as close to the original meaning as possible." The art of Hopelandic translation is, apparently, a delicate one; so is the innate Icelandic desire to cultivate enigmas that arouse the world’s curiosity. To what extent will Sigur Ros linguistically embrace their growing global audience? Last month, the Icelandic newspaper Morgunbladid reported that in a recent survey on the Sigur Ros Web site, the majority of 1,200 fans were opposed to the band singing in English. That’s not just Icelandic nationalism talking; half of the votes were from Britain and North America. And yet, according to Daily News From Iceland, Sigur Ros performed a hometown concert on June 3 that included some songs in English; locals were apparently unfazed and didn’t even mention this curious detail in their own online reviews. Blessed to have fans in love with mystery, Sigur Ros will undoubtedly continue to craft cold, ethereal music with lyrics as cryptic as skaldic poetry and as elusive as the island’s faeries — or the truth of Icelanders’ belief in them. The guys in Sigur Ros knew what they were doing when they chose a phosphorescent winged embryo to grace the cover of Agaetis Byrjun. Like the curving highways that carefully skirt Iceland’s faerie rocks and enchanted mountains, the little figure’s umbilical cord twists, gently but deliberately, connected to who knows what — and suggesting nothing so much as a simple but unmistakable question mark. Enter the Pop Forum Jeff Sypeck is a writer based in Washington, D.C. He hopes someday to understand the mysteries of Icelandic hot dog toppings.
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