The 7-LPs will be housed in a three different sleeves alongside an 84-page clothbound, it's all presented in a luxurious cloth-wrapped slipcase. For the super-fans, the Sigur Rós online shop will offer an exclusive 7-LP edition replicating the tracks from the 4-CD edition, due on July 26.
#Sigur ros agaetis byrjun album download#
There's a 2-LP version due on July 16 that features the original album (plus outtakes, live material and demos on a download voucher). In addition to the 4-CD edition, two further configurations are set to arrive later this month. On July 5, the band revisited the album with an expanded, 4-CD deluxe edition that brings together a remastered version of the album, demos, newly unearthed alternative versions, B-sides, and even a full, 95-minute concert in Reykjavik from the day the album was released. One of the songs, "Svefn-g-englar," made it onto the Vanilla Sky soundtrack in 2001, and Q Magazine even went as far as to deem it "the last great album of the 20th century."
And so it proved to be, as critics everywhere praised the album. Rather, it's a rugged, cave-dwelling cousin to Agaetis Byrjun's stargazing hopefulness and environmentalism.Twenty years ago, Icelandic electronic act Sigur Rós released Ágætis Byrjun (meaning "A Good Beginning"). But in sounding so consciously epic, the album comes across more self-aware- and thus less powerful- than its offspring. Much like Agaetis Byrjun, Von thrives on a certain amount of landscaping- wandering the Icelandic countryside is a surreal and uncanny experience, one that Sigur Ros convey beautifully. "Myrkur", though redolent of Pink Floyd and Hum, is happily and naively detached. Even in its most conventional moments, Von sounds utterly unlike anything from the period, and is only tentatively allusive of the band's fecund latter-day output. Uncharacteristically, one can actually hear a well-defined set of reference points here, including Mogwai, Hawkwind, and Spacemen 3.įor the most part, however, Von is very distant from its time. Tape splices chatter through the opening section before a sludgy guitar and martial drums enter to pilot the fracas. Centered around a harrowing vocal refrain, the song paints with darker hues than Sigur Ros' newer material, but still bears the band's unmistakable emblem. Things don't really get off the ground until "Hun Jord". But the voices are eventually fed through a voicebox and garbled beyond recognition, establishing Sigur Ros on the edgier side of the divide. "Dogun" prolongs the shapelessness, though in a slightly more affable fashion: The song features the sort of ethereal, reverb-laden choral intonations that tread the fenceline between blissed-out psych and Enya-style therapop. Imagine the nebulous prelude of Agaetis Byrjun opener "Intro" stretched to 10 times its original length and without a tension-breaker like "Sven-G-Englar" to empty into. At more than nine minutes in length, the track is an ambient impasse, a slow-moving mass of nothing much.
Naturally, Von kicks off with a bold mission statement: "Sigur Ros", which is purposefully stagnant and entirely too long. Young, earnest, eerie, and overzealous, Von is a unique, almost belligerently unaffiliated piece of music that unsubtly blazons its idiosyncrasies.
As such, it's an exciting look back at a once-mysterious group who leaped from obscurity to mug the mainstream. At 72 minutes, the album is bloated with ideas Sigur Ros would refine on their sophomore outing. Whereas on that record- nestled cozily inside a fully realized voice- they sounded up to the task, Von is weighted down by the band's bodacious ambition. Kitschy and tongue-in-cheek enough to win over Jack Black (who this year championed Eagles of Death Metal as his sole nomination)? Well, they're Icelandic.Īround the release of Agaetis Byrjun, Sigur Ros promised to "change music.and the way people think about music" forever. A shining example of sacrosanct iconoclasm? Truly. Fewer than 500,000 copies sold? Hell, Von initially printed less than 500. Before Sigur Ros won the inaugural Shortlist Prize in 2001 for Agaetis Byrjun, they composed another album that would have met the award's criteria.
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