Yet the end result truly sounded like nothing else.
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The mammoth post-rock of Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the dream-pop adventures of Slowdive and Cocteau Twins, the noise-blasted beauty of Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine - those references and more were there to be mined out. There were traces of Radiohead in the music’s astonishing ambition, and especially in Jón Þór Birgisson’s celestial falsetto. Sigur Rós shared a mystical sensibility with Björk, their fellow Icelandic export. Even the few who encountered Von’s unremarkable longform experiments could not have anticipated this album it would have scanned as extraterrestrial even without that illustration of an alien baby on the cover. In truth Ágætis byrjun emerged out of Reykjavík, but in essence it came out of nowhere.
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It was self-evidently brilliant at the time, and two decades later it stands as one of the most astounding and singular collections of music ever released. In the months and years after its initial drop, the album set off a global chain reaction that yielded releases in the UK in 2000 and North America in 2001, turning Sigur Rós into legends before they even released the follow-up in 2002. It’s one of those records for which overwrought praise feels entirely appropriate - not just an undeniable masterpiece but, for many, a religious experience that inspired evangelistic fervor. Ágætis byrjun is worthy of every grandiose adjective you could throw at it. “Great” would also be selling it short, as would “awesome,” “excellent,” “terrific,” and just about any other pedestrian expression of positivity. That’s the other reason Ágætis byrjun is a misnomer: “Good” doesn’t begin to do it justice. But soon enough it would be inciting rapture around the world.
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Ágætis byrjun did not immediately reach a large audience either when Smekkleysa released it 20 years ago today. As the story goes, Von only sold 313 copies in its first year on sale. Their debut, Von, was released into obscurity in 1997 by Smekkleysa (translation: Bad Taste), the Icelandic label previously best known for launching the Sugarcubes. The LP that broke Sigur Rós and blew millions of minds in the process was not technically the band’s beginning. That’s an accurate translation of the title Ágætis byrjun, and yet in precise terms it does not fit the album it belongs to. Which means that "Good Start" might as well become of the most charming understatements to come out of a band in years.“A good start” is not quite right. Rarely has a sophomore effort sounded this thick and surprising. 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. Take "Hjartað 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. However, at its worst, the album sometimes slides into an almost overkill of sonic structures. At its best, the album seems to accomplish everything lagging post-shoegazers like Spiritualized or Chapterhouse once promised. One will constantly be waiting to hear what fascinating turns such complex musicianship will take at a moment's notice. Extremely deep strings underpin falsetto wails from the mournfully epic ("Viðar Vel Tl Loftárasa") to the unreservedly cinematic ("Avalon").
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The rest of this full-length follows such similar quality. 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. Indeed, Ágætis Byrjun pulls no punches from the start. So as talented as Von might have been, this time out is probably even more worthy of dramatic debut expectations. This second album - Ágætis Byrjun - translates roughly to Good Start. Even on aesthetic matters, Sigur Rós entitle their sophomore effort not in a manner to play up the irony of high expectations (à la the Stone Roses' Second Coming), but in a modest realization. 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.