Why the hate for Sigur Ros?

docu will be called "The Show Of Shows" btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFfyt6Hdmnk.

Weird. Bought it having played that ... but now it is doing absolutely nothing for me.

I finally got around to buying Kveikur. It's got some good songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU3TYFSNybg

http://www.dooloop.tv/iframe/embed/?vid=4323187&as=0&ivw=specials/extern_as&

^^ 24 hour slow TV thing.

^ Curious new video.

3 nights in LA with an orchestra etc, April 2017

http://www.laphil.com/tickets/reykjavik-festival

I still like some of the early stuff but I still cant believe how badly the third album drops in the last three tracks. How unvarying the vocals are in them, it sounds like slight variations of the same sounds. Keep hearing "You sigh alone, you sign on a lot, you siphon a load".

tbf those lyrics would be an awesome encapsulation of millennial anomie

Definitely sums up my issues with () quite well!! Felt very lazy

Disagree.

The words were never meant to be anything other than another instrument on that album.

Far and away their best work.

I knew the vocals were not proper words, the problem is those last three tracks and much of Takk isn't creative enough with the vocals to carry off this approach.

Less like Liz Fraser and Magma and more like When Dinosurs Ruled The Earth ("akita!") and Team America ("durka durka"). Although Fraser and Magma used made up words rather than sounds, or maybe a mixture?

This isn't a problem in the earlier Sigur Ros stuff, so it's more frustrating.

first album and eps all great. lost interest after that

First album is seriously great. Remember I was in a stage production of Little shop of Horrors and hearing that album was deeply therapeutic. Untitled was also good, but christ after that I fell off pretty deep.

Once a band becomes a peak and valleys catharsis and reprieve formula, it's time to jet. They were pretty amazing live in the early days

So, wait, when you guys are saying "first album", are you referring to Von? Because that's a pretty brave statement, considering how dull most of that record is.

And I will still ride pretty hard for Kveikur, and especially Valtari.

Agaetis Byrjun is the album everyone thinks is their first. it's like that with Mew's Frengers too.

Von has some good tracks but Agaetis Byrjun was a massive step up.

Always forget Von is their first, largely because Agaetis was pushed as their "debut" of sorts at the time

I looooooooooooved Sigur Rós circa 2001 - 2005 (the rooftop scene at the end of Vanilla Sky was my gateway). I also fell off hard after Takk, which I really liked. By the time the next record came out (2008?), their shtick and post-rock's schtick in general had already been completely exhausted and started showing up everywhere in movies, tv, commercials... proto-"epiphany core" music defined by Arcade Fire's "Wake Up." it was just like grunge, there was only so much you could do with epic quiet-loud-quiet instrumental rock. Same thing happened for me with Explosions in the Sky - I adored The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, but the 2007 record was in one ear out the other for me. They're another band that was liscened a lot.

yeah flappy bird, well said

lol didn't mean to italicize EITS...

also i gotta stick up for ( ), the first song and the one that was in Vanilla Sky are my favorite Sigur Rós songs. But R.A.G. is right - Jonsi recycles the same vocal melody and made up lines on the back half of the album. It's not that I don't dig him singing in a made up language - just that he's singing the same made-up phrase with similar inflection and melody on half the record.

xp thanks

I’ve listened to new stuff from this band since the album where they’re all naked on the cover - maybe ten years ago now?

But for whatever reason I just gave their new one, “Route 1”, a try - it’s really nice. More of a straight ambient record than what I’d expect a Sigur Ros album to sound like. Jonsi’s voice doesn’t show up until the last track, and even then just barely.

I have a feeling this is an outlier in their discography but I’m inclined to try some more recent albums just to see.

it's a reworking of the software-generated soundtrack to their 24 hour trip on Iceland's route one iirc (the 360° video is on youtube)

Meant to say above I’ve NOT listened to new stuff for the last ten years...

ísjaki off of 'kveikur' is one of my fav sigur ros tunes

drummer orri accused of not just sexual assault but rape

i guess at the time the accuser was working at famed la stripclub the body shop

what do you mean by the latter?

i don't know but she brought it up in her statement on her instagram

https://grapevine.is/news/2018/10/01/drummer-for-sigur-ros-quits-band-in-wake-of-sexual-assault-allegations/

https://pitchfork.com/news/kjartan-sveinsson-rejoins-sigur-ros/

it just wasn't the same without him

the one record they released without him was pretty different

A welcome return.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hMsrhbjJkY

been gingerly revisiting the discog, think i skipped hvarf at the time which is a shame because i love metal sigur rós and here's a shining example of it

I feel like some luster was lost once people started posting "Justin Bieber slowed down x800" videos.

i loved that hvarf/heim stuff. that was pretty much peak fandom era for me. pretty sure i'd love anything that has multiple versions of "von" on it, but that was perfect timing.

i gotta say given how long sigur rós records traditionally are hvarf only being 37 minutes long is a real advantage, i've played it twice this morning already. every song is a stunner too. "hljómalind" is downright dream-pop

or slowcore? or both... at the same time.....

then again maybe these guys were always more of a slowcore dream-pop band than a post-rock band

Yeah, honestly, I always got more of a slowcore/shoegaze vibe from them. Don't know where the post-rock thing came from, maybe because it's in the same loosely similar dynamic neo-classical sheets of sound mode as, I dunno, Godspeed or something?

Wrong link, oops -

I still really like Heima (the film) and watch it often, with that extra disc worth of footage, it's so beautiful. The outdoor version of Olsen Olsen, just great.

There's a 1080 version on their YT channel from last year, I wonder if it'll come out on BluRay at some stage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bvoi8urTzk

then again maybe these guys were always more of a slowcore dream-pop band than a post-rock band

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Friday, February 18, 2022 8:26 AM

All of that, but they blended it so well with their own ideas of folk music. Their influences were on display pretty well, but nobody really sounded like them. I always just presumed them to be big Pygmalion fans, but mixed with whatever the Icelandic equivalent of goth is.

the album with all the butts on it is very very very good, i'd forgotten

every melody on this album is perfect????

That's the album where it sounded like they got kinda into AnCo and hitting floor toms and bouncing around, then had some time off and made the intensely soporific and sad Valtari.

The elements that folks may highlight to criticize Sigur Ros are really their strengths imho.

The narrow palette of sounds, textures, tempos that they drew from, again and again, the repetition of certain subtle little sound design tricks (pitched down/up backward sounds), (over)use of reverb and drone, that one phrase Jonsi sings over nearly an entire album.

The notion that they're perhaps hiding a lack of songcraft or ideas underneath a banket of drones and string sections, yet they feature a version of Ágætis Byrjun on the film soundtrack, unfettered by production and recorded very simply in a community hall and it is absolutely lovely, along with most of the rest of the performances on the film, kinda disproves the idea.

i like valtari a lot, sounds like the very idea of the band disintegrating

The notion that they're perhaps hiding a lack of songcraft or ideas underneath a banket of drones and string sections

Leading that one album off with "Gobbledigook" was a nice retort.

Valtari was a big favorite at the time, but haven't listened to it in years. I do remember there was a song that they repeated from Inni and I really like that one.

Lúppulagið, yeah that's a marvelous track.

i still always wish they'd let loose more like on "popplagid"