Sigur Rós -- ( )

10/10

How do you find a band when you don't know their name, album, song titles, or lyrics? Well, now you just raise your phone in the air and click Shazam, but in late 2002 and early 2003, after hearing Sigur Rós' "Ný batterí," I had far fewer options. Type "European band whose guitar sounds like a violin" into Webcrawler? Yes, Webcrawler. It was 2003.
Eventually, I was able to narrow my selection to a few bands. The most likely choice seemed to be the one that proved correct, Sigur Rós. However, I really could only stab at the dark, and hope that the Sigur Rós CD I bought from Best Buy in May 2003 not only had the song I was looking for, but was by the correct band. Also, "stab at the dark" makes it sound like I am a Hobbit in a cave, and after doing my stabbing, I am hopping that when I get my lamp lit, I'll see a dead orc covered in blood, and not my accompanying Hobbit buddy.
In the first ten seconds of listening to Sigur Rós' ( ), my dopamine centers went Tsar Bomba. I immediately knew I had found the right band. I also shortly found that I had the wrong album, but I did not care at all. This music took me to another world.
I had a paper on the ancient epic, Beowulf, due the next day. Not like a "Beowulf is a poem about..." paper, but a lengthy final paper for an upper level college course involving multiple citations from books older than LSU itself about the importance of aesthetics in Beowulf. Of course, I hadn't even begun on the first sentence.
I went home, but got so lost in Sigur Rós that I couldn't get the paper going. I had a DJ shift at KLSU that night from 9-11, so I decided I'd just pull an all-nighter and knock it out when I got home from that. After all, me good at English, right? That night, my shift went well. I played a bunch of great songs, and had fun cutting up on air with my co-hosts. However, as we walked to our cars after the shift, I noticed one of my co-hosts seemed particularly glum. I asked him if he was okay, and it turned out he most definitely wasn't, which resulted in a conversation that lasted another two hours. I left LSU's campus around 1 am. My paper was due in eight hours.
Sigur Rós' ( ) fits Beowulf. It indeed conjures Scandinavian images, as something created in Iceland should. The bowed, violin-like guitar, the icily distorted and warped piano, the pitch-shifted vocal loops, the glacial, thick Arctic march of the drums, the forceful, seabed dredging bass, and the high, alien vocals of Jónsi Birgisson. The ever present, emoting strings. The way it hints at community, while perforating a cold well of deep sadness, with sudden outbursts of intense, emotional violence. This isn't something you just listen to on a technical level. These are sounds you feel. I feel the same way about Beowulf. Most ancient manuscripts, even with a great translation, can often feel cold and remote. Beowulf feels close to me. That night, I listened to "Untitled" 1 on ( ) in a six hour loop, while writing nonstop, then drove straight to my teacher's office to turn in my paper. I got a 97.

That summer, Sigur Rós became an obsession. I had already been listening to a ton of Radiohead. I had also taken a renewed dive into the music of Portishead, four years after an initial obsession with them in 1999. As this was to be my last summer as a college student (Joke being on me, I ended up having one more!), I decided I would work as little as possible, instead staying home to play hours -long sessions of Chrono Cross, watch Neon Genesis Evangelion, get myself ready for the next Lord of the Rings movie, and write depressing, post-apocalyptic poetry, all with a constant Sigur Rós hum in the background. It was glorious, though now that I look back on it, not leaving my room for months, while shunning contact with friends, and generally lying around and doing nothing, and this easily the third or fourth time I had done that in a five year period, I really should have started talking to a counselor about my depression sooner. Then again, when you've grown up in a cult like I did, and at one point experienced your own mother throwing away all of your personal possessions while you were at school, and at another, having your "pastor" look through you music collection and then declare that you are demon-possessed and need deliverance, you tend to get a little protective of your interests. I had made my own little world for myself, and I didn't want it to be taken away. I was two years away from finally getting out of that cult, and many years away from getting comfortable with my own skin and interests, so the only thing that I knew to do at that point to feel safe was to create an iridescent, impenetrable shell around myself, and hide inside it.
Yes, seven years into this series, it's obvious these reviews aren't always about the music, but about the life I experienced while listening to it, to help me remember. That summer was something magical, but frail and easily shattered. Thankfully, outside of its context, I can still enjoy everything I liked then, now. When I listen to ( ) in the context of the present, with its eight untitled tracks, I am still moved by its power, the way it goes from a mournful morning call through snowy fog, to a beautiful thawing rain, to a joyous sunbath, to a bleak death march, to a final cathartic outburst of sound I still haven't heard surpassed.

I don't know why bands get older and wiser, yet can't surpass the emotional high-points of their youth. Maybe your dopamine levels just drop too much to be capable of such things. Maybe my own dopamine levels have dropped to the point that current bands are making music this powerful, and I'm just not getting it. Who knows. Maybe I'll hear something this staggering one day, pull out my phone and Shazam it. Instant gratification. Or maybe not.

2002 FatCat Records
1. Untitled 6:38
2. Untitled 7:33
3. Untitled 6:33
4. Untitled 7:33
5. Untitled 9:57
6. Untitled 8:48
7. Untitled 13:00
8. Untitled 11:44