Music : Agaetis Byrjun

Rating: - Stop reading and buy this album
Sigur Ros are a 4 piece outfit from Iceland, whose second studio album is quite simply the most jaw dropping, heart stopping piece of music that these ears have heard in ages and ages. If not ever. The sound of their music defies my desire to afford it suitable description. One review of this album that I read on the Net described it as 'the soundtrack to a Heavenly afterlife'. I will offer little that is more fitting than that.

However, reviews require comparisons and I would be failing you if I didn't provide one - however inadequate.

Imagine the sound of Air's 'Moon Safari'. Add the sound of Radiohead at their evocative, powerful best. Mix in the sort of piano and string work that would make you weep for joy if you heard it at Café Mambo. Then roast in the oven for 40 minutes at gas mark Melody. Double it and you have the defining album of this, or possibly any, summer.

10 tracks. One second short of 72 minutes. Chilled to the bone rhythms meet haunting instrumentation and ethereal 'Hopelandish' vocals to produce sheer emotion distilled into crescendo after slowly building crescendo. Pick a fine summer's evening, light a barbie, get some mates round; eat, drink and then watch them all fall apart as your new Sigur Ros cd melts even the hardest of their hearts.

If only one of you buys this album and, in short time, comes to agree with me then the mission that I currently feel I am on will have been satisfied.

"Agaetis Byrjun" apparently translates roughly as "A new beginning". Buy it. Treasure it.

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Rating: - The best album ever recorded...
This album is simply breathtaking- although at first the unique sound of Sigur Ros may seem strange, after a few listens you appreciate how wonderful, how beautiful the music is. Wonderfully chilled out, this is poetry put to a musical score- buy it now and you will not be disappointed. This is the best album I've ever heard in my life; there are none greater.

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Rating: - Brilliant
the only word i can use to describe this album is incredible. The use of instrumentation, orchestration and dynamics is truely perfect. Unless you are fluent in Icelandic, you will not understand the lyrics, but that doesn't matter. The wonderful melodies float over purely beautiful music, this is enough to take you somewhere else.
It's one of those albums you can listen to again and again, something new in the music will crop up every time you listen to it. The use of bowing on the guitar creates a machine like sound and is high in the mix.
Thank God someone out there is doing this. Perhaps the future is not so bleak.

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Rating: - If you (really) love music you cannot miss this CD
I bought this CD after some friends recommendation and I didn't know what I was going to find. The first times I played it was a strange feeling because the sonority was very different from anything I had heard before. But after a some time I was completely hooked and has become one of my favourite CD's. If you (really) love music try Sigur Roos.

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Rating: - Otherworldly Blues
Listening to this album, I was reminded of a quote on the back of a Bob Dylan album (Highway 61 Revisited I'm pretty sure). "Most people play blues to give them the blues, it should be played to take them away" (excuse my poor paraphrasing). Sigur Ros certainly have that quality and much more. And while I feel that perhaps to those of us who do not understand non-Icelandic/"Hopelandic", we may be missing a vital ingredient in their music, the orchestration, melodies and harmonies alone do well enough to express that feeling of longing yet hope. This is truely beautiful music.