Sigur Rós – Valtari Review

“But no, always

Spreading the wing of the impossible

You wake, with a cry,

From the site, which is only a dream…”

-Yves Bonnefoy

With Sigur Rós it’s always a question of beginnings and ends.  Their presence is process.  Their work is in a constant state of becoming; unraveling its own DNA.

They do not write pop songs.  They do not buy into the top forty distraction.

And to listen is to commit.  To buy into the time required to experience something just a bit beyond reach.

But, the last decade has been good to them.  They now have a following.  People pay attention to what they are doing.  The work has been legitimated.  And it would seem, at least in the band’s frame of mind, it is time to use it.

——-

Their newest record Valtari is somewhat of a return, carrying remnants of their first record Von, but with a slight worn.  It’s aged a bit.  The sound is weathered.  Time has wrapped itself all over the landscape.

Featuring an extensive use of strings and vocal orchestrations, the music is linked to everything that has come before, but there is more at stake in the sound.  It feels like something has been lost. What they once unfurled is no longer so simple an idea.

The band has always had a certain angelic/apocalyptic quality to their stylings.  It is no mistake that many consider their concerts to be a religious experience.  But, there is something else at work here.  The edges of construction are showing a bit.  The sound is subdued and at times verges on its own destruction.

Like film slowly withering away with every screening.

The burn of sunlight revealing new visions.

It’s fragile.

It’s not a studio album.  At least, as far as the reality of a studio album is often associated.  It’s a crack in the pavement – sounds not always railing to be true.

At times, there is a certain low-fi sensibility embraced along with a more Avante-garde (as in the foremost part of an army advancing into battle) turn a phrase.  Like Radiohead, to whom they are often linked, they are using their legitimacy to legitimate ideas currently on the fringe.  They are making it okay to do these sorts of things.

It’s a world distant from understood.  These words I am writing cannot capture what it is to be a part of these articulations – this lingering of threads to nothing so clear.  Sounds in space – glimmers of a previous known falling out of reach – the adjustment of old radio dials slowly.  Various sources becoming various stages of oneness, hints of other realities, another understanding, informing the ways we rectify existence.

These are end times.  This is their sound.

The album speaks to what we are going through culturally, politically, environmentally, etc, from a future perspective.  When the earth has burned up and industry collapses under its own weight, this will be sound.  When it has all come and gone this will be the remnants of our reality.  “The dream is without end, waking is without beginning; neither one nor the other ever reaches itself.”¹

——-

Sigur Rós - Valtari Review
Rating
It’s a great record. A beautiful collection of tracks as no other band could imagine. After all these years they’ve got more to do and seem to want to do it. It’s a new stage for the band - new ideas emerging. Only time will tell if there is something to fulfill or if it’s a closing of the guard. The links to their origin could be a nice finality. One last sequence of ideas before the particles disperse, becoming part of something new. Maybe it’s for a time to come. Maybe it’s for a time we’ve already seen. Either way, what we have here, is a work that complicates the listening and strives to do more than simply lull us into distraction.

1. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

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