ГЃgГ¦tis Byrjun is an album that demands to be played loudly, outdoors, and in moments of quiet introspection. Olsen Olsen drifts into solidity like a dream colliding with the waking world, and and the album closer, Avalon, seems to usher in the new century from a hillside ceremony. The opening measures of Hjartao Hamast seem genuinely out of place, sounding a bit like a Fender Rhodes and harmonica outtake from some lost Led Zeppelin session. Flugufrelsarinn features some devastatingly beautiful bowed guitar by Birgisson.The jubilation that comes toward the end of ny Batteri is unexpected and surprisingly heartbreaking. Staralfur is lush in its string orchestration. From there, the album careens and cascades through a scattershot portrait a world weвЂ™ve never known. The album opens with the sonar pings and tranquil liquidity of the subtly noisy Svefn-G-Englar, whose heartbeat ending is as close to a gradual passing from one world to the next as one could hope for. Birgisson often draws a cello bow across his guitar strings, and the drums are as often played with brushes as they are pounded and tape-looped like booted feet across a frozen tundra. Somewhere an acoustic guitar plunks clumsily and a horn section sounds the dawn. And in its epic runtime (over an hour) and its demand to be heard in full, ГЃgГ¦tis Byrjun is something of an anomaly in an increasingly singles-driven digital decade.ДЄ cathedral organ gives way to white noise and chamber-music string orchestrations. The music here is rich, lush, and intentional, while maintaining the sparse simplicity of a sun-washed hillside or a glacierвЂ™s path. All of this lends the music a sense of deeply religious fervor, an almost ceremonial elegance and solemnity. And his lyrics are as often sung in his invented language, Hopelandish, as they are in any real tongue. Vocalist JГіnsi Birgisson sounds like something ethereal вЂ“ or perhaps like something sprung from the tender beginnings of the blue-inked angelic fetus that bizarrely graces the albumвЂ™s cover. Their music sounds as though itвЂ™s existed since some time around the dawn of civilization while at once sounding completely new and unsullied by all this cinderblock modernity.

Sigur RГіs have been dubbed вЂњpost-rockвЂќ but thatвЂ™s not really fair. Nothing youвЂ™ve ever heard before can prepare you for whatвЂ™s contained in this sprawling collection of tracks.

IcelandвЂ™s Sigur RГіs have stated plainly their intent to вЂњchange music forever, and the way people think about music.вЂќ And with their second proper album, ГЃgГ¦tis Byrjun, they seem to be making good on their promise.

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