This is perhaps the hardest post in the series that I’ll have to write, because as I sit here staring at the computer screen and begin tapping out these introductory sentences, I have no idea where the article is going to end up. That’s fitting, given that I’m writing about Sigur Rós. I first heard Ágætis byrjun sometime in 2000, a year or so after it was first released, and I played it for anyone who would listen. I admit that I didn’t quite get the record myself, not in the same way all the reviewers and music journalists seemed to understand it, but I knew that I was getting something from it: an honest to goodness emotional response. There were moments that just made my heart swell, even though the music itself was dark and intrinsically sad. What struck me the most is the way the music would start off in one place, and by the time the album was over, you had gone somewhere completely different than you would ever have imagined. It was a real head-scratcher, because I wasn’t quite sure that what I was feeling matched what I was hearing. By the time ( ) came around in 2002, I seriously thought I was being had. I couldn’t get past the fact that there was no name to the disc, no song titles, and next to nothing on the sleeve that would even indicate that this was a Sigur Rós record. It was all just too gimmicky. I let the record (and the band) go as just one of my passing flights of fancy, another case of getting caught up in the eagerness of over-zealous music journalism, wanting to be “with it”, and failing to really understand what the band was all about.
So even though Takk… is the album that sits here on the list as a defining moment, it wasn’t until Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (“with a buzz in our ears we play endlessly”) that I truly went back to listening to Sigur Rós. By 2008, the band had significantly evolved and stepped into new territory. There was melody, there was brass, there was something resembling traditional song structures, and there was joy, sunshine, and exuberance. When did things change? Their last release was 2007’s Hvarf/Heim, the soundtrack to the documentary Hlemmur, and between that and ( ) there had been only one studio release: Takk… (2005). That album was the missing link. It was an evolutionary step between the elegiac sound of ( ) and Ágætis byrjun and the transformative joy of Með suð…; it was a figurative slap to the forehead, a eureka moment in sound. Takk… had been the Sigur Rós album I had been waiting for, the album where it would all come together for me and not only make me feel something, but make me “get” it all, too. That’s why am I signaling out an album that I heard three years after it was first released, as opposed to the record that brought me back to the band. I fell back in love with Sigur Rós on Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, but Takk… is my greatest musical regret of the last 10 years. I regret having abandoned interest in the band too early, and I regret ignoring the record when it came out.
Listening to Takk… for the first time was a revelation. Andy Kellman, reviewing the album for allmusic.com hit the nail on the head when he said that Sigur Rós have “gone from providing the background music to death announcements” to songs like “Sé Lest” which flutter and crest, swell and soar in ways that their previous work never managed to do. So while I may have come to the album a few years behind schedule, I’m thankful for having gotten there all the same. It’s ironic that the album’s name translates to “thanks…” because it is I who should be thanking them.
MP3: Sigur Rós “Sé Lest”
Myspace: Sigur Rós
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