SIGUR RÓS
Ágætis Byrjun: A Good Beginning KRUNK
9/10
SIGUR RÓS were only partly joking when they made a certain proclamation in 1999. “We do not intend to become superstars or millionaires,” the band posted on their website. “We are simply gonna change music forever, and the way people think about music. And don’t think we can’t do it, we will.” This may have been merely an act of youthful hubris, the lippy pretensions of a bunch of twentysomethings with nothing to lose. But it was also a measure of their brazen ambition and absolute surety in the music they’d been constructing over the past year. So much so that, when second album Ágætis Byrjun landed that summer, it seemed less like hyperbole and more like the fulfilment of a prophecy.
Ágætis Byrjun was as striking as it was unexpected. Formed in Reykjavik five years earlier, Sigur Rós had laboured over their debut LP, Von (translation: “Hope”). It finally saw light of day in 1997, following a painful two-year gestation, though the band still weren’t fully enamoured with the results. Issued on the local Bad Taste label set up by fellow Icelanders The Sugarcubes, Von pitched itself somewhere between shoegaze and ambient music. Sales were modest, to put it politely. It sold just over 300 copies at home.
But Von did at least place down a marker. Lyrics to a new composition begun shortly afterwards detailed the band’s resolve: “We were all in agreement/We will do better next time/This is an alright start.” The song in question – “Ágætis Byrjun” (“A Good Beginning”) – would serve as notice of a renewed spirit, as well as providing a useful album title.
A key factor in the album’s expansive new vision was the recent addition of multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson, whose prowess as an arranger allowed the band far greater harmonic scope. Alongside English producer Ken Thomas and the founding trio of
