A cold start
Icelandic group’s 1999 breakthrough in definitive 7-LP/4-CD form. David Fricke still gets chills.
Sigur Rós ★★★★ Ágaetis Byrjun – A Good Beginning: 20th Anniversary Edition KRUNK. CD/DL/LP
ON JUNE 12, 1999, the Icelandic band Sigur Rós – then a local modern-rock curiosity specialising in a glacial-paced reverb-laden impressionism of no fixed precedent and uncertain commercial appeal – played a record-release show at the Icelandic Opera House in downtown Reykjavík. Despite the grand suggestion, the venue was a converted cinema basically hosting a neighbourhood gig. Two years later, eight people fainted during the band’s first concert in New York – possibly from heat and the sold-out crush; probably from rapture.
The difference between that hometown modesty and the international hysteria: the enveloping grandeur and patient, transportive spell of Ágaetis Byrjun, a debut in everything but number – named in the spirit of rebirth, it was Sigur Rós’s second album – and a record that has lost none of its power to confound and dazzle.
Even at this remove, nearly a dozen studio, live, soundtrack and remix albums later, Sigur Rós’s quantum leap from their dreamy, inconclusive debut, 1997’s Von (which didn’t chart in Iceland), to the cathedral-rock scale and orchestrated confidence of Ágaetis Byrjun defies easy summation.
The band were working with English producer Ken Thomas for the first time, going through changes and battling uncertainty. Original drummer Ágúst AEvar Gunnarsson left soon after the sessions; keyboardsman Kjartan Sveinsson had just arrived.
Sessions went way over schedule and budget, while the title piece, according to the notes in this lavishly-illustrated 20th birthday edition, was a double-edged reference to “the joy and disappointment” of Von.
But there was no mistaking the signature innovation, in the opening expanse of Svefng-englar, of Jónsi Birgisson’s long droning arcs of guitar, conjured with a cello bow – like a gentler sorcerer’s twist on the slow-motion middle of Led Zeppelin’s Dazed And Confused – and the precise, hanging suspense of his falsetto singing, a lush, comforting hypnosis with a disturbing undercoat of menace. Among the many archival recordings excavated for this reissue – including demos, early arrangements and three abandoned songs – is an even longer Svefn-g-englar, recently born and just instrumental, from an Icelandic radio broadcast in the summer of 1998. What now sounds like an affirmation of vision must have been a genuine shock over the wireless.
The official live premiere of Ágaetis Byrjun at that June 1999 concert – Gunnarsson’s last show with co-founders Birgisson and bassist Georg Hólm – is also featured here, in its entirety for the first time. Flugufrelsarinn and Ny´batteri sound born to soar; Von’s Hafssól is a glowing stasis, an epic climax still in frequent rotation. Nothing happens fast. But after this night, nothing was the same either.