It generously furnishes palatial sets where we can play out our own stories, fill in our own poetry, doodle in the blank CD booklet, and post our own lyrics on the band’s website. But it conveys unaccountable levels of banked power, stupefying beauty, and personal meaning for the listener, not despite but because it is untethered from authorial meaning. Like many things about Sigur Rós, the Hopelandic conceit should be desperately corny.
#Effortless swimming full#
Whereas the cover of Ágætis byrjun had been full of presence-a baby alien angel in utero, sure, but still-( ) portrayed an absence, a pair of empty, cut-out parentheses that gave it an ad hoc name. The songs-all either long or very long-were untitled. Instead of going to a fancy studio, they recorded in an empty swimming pool, and while the album came out sounding as upholstered and overwhelming as its predecessor, it was also sparser and sterner, and it lingered in more complicated moods. When they turned to Hopelandic in full on their expectation-laden third record, in 2002, it was but one tone in a deceptive ring of repudiation, as if they were giving their moment the cold shoulder. It seems that there was no occasion that could not be elevated by luxurious folds and piles of bowed electric guitar simple, sonorous orchestration and Jónsi’s warm, teary, falsetto-prone tenor. It was greeted as both the last great record of the 20th century and the first vital one of the 21st, a prophecy borne out by its long diffusion, both directly and as a stylistic influence, through the new millennium’s increasingly edgeless landscape of music, entertainment, and advertising. A hit in Iceland in 1999, it spread globally over the next two years via re-release on FatCat, a memorable sync in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, and the shiny new Web 2.0. Sigur Rós dabbled in Hopelandic on Ágætis byrjun, their breakout second album.
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