I remember back in middle school I made up my own language. Well, you couldn't really read it or speak it, but you could definitely write it, so it was kind of a series of indecipherable characters. Without a real function or meaning, the language died soon after it was born.
When artists sing in different languages, I think of my own fledgling dialect and find solace. For me, songs in a different tongue face the same futile struggle; I cannot read the lyrics or sing along, and so my interest subsides after an instance or two where I truly believe I'll be able to imitate and reproduce the sounds I hear, without so much as knowing what they mean.
Or so it was until about a month ago. One month ago today, I began my love affair with the ethereal Icelandic group, Sigur Rós. I should have known that if you're good enough to tour with Radiohead, you're probably good enough to be on this music aficionado's iPod. The band's lead singer, Jón Þór Birgisson, made up his own language, "Hopelandic," by improvising a phonetic collection of words to sound Icelandic. Many of the words and syllables sound English, but have different meanings from their English equivalent in the constructed language.
Sigur Rós combines a rock and roll mentality with a flair for the slow, incessant climb toward an understated climax. Their songs can be good for studying or as background music for a dinner. I know now that what I'd been missing was the perfect music for both drifting off to sleep and slowly coming back to consciousness after a long slumber. All the traditional elements are there, but as guitars clash, drums clang and Birgisson calmly croons, all is lost in a wall of sound too brashly beautiful to come from anywhere with a population much larger than the Coliseum.
What makes Sigur Rós so accessible as a foreign-language band is the fact that Birgisson uses his voice like an instrument. At times pulsing and rhythmic like the strings of a cello, Birgisson can bring his volume down to a whisper and then explode into a varied landscape of flowing verse. As the band's lead guitarist, the lead singer uses a bow from a cello to play electric guitar on some songs, creating a sound similar to that of his voice.
Sigur Rós broke out in a big way with Ágætis Byrjun in 1999. The critical acclaim they garnered sent them off to tour with big names and had some critics proclaiming that the album was the best of its kind to come around in a long time. The songs on Ágætis Byrjun tend to be more on the pop side of things, or as poppy as you can be when you're working with an orchestra and a made-up language. Sigur Rós uses all the instrumentation you'd come to expect from Iceland's musical products (think Björk without all the weirdness of a swan dress).
In some ways, their fourth full-length album released in 2002, the unspeakable ( ), reminds me of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. The first album to feature Hopelandic, ( ) doesn't have official titles for the tracks, but the band's comprehensive Web site lists the titles they use for their set lists. Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine," is replaced by "Álafoss," while "Dauðalagið" and "Popplagið" sub in for "Shine on You Crazy Diamond." There's no match for "Wish You Were Here," a song I feel might be the best ever written, but the rest of the album has moments that remind me of "Have a Cigar."
On their most recent album, Takk…, Sigur Rós find a middle ground between the pop sensibilities that made Ágætis Byrjun such a big hit and the instrumental aspects that drove ( ) to be the ideal record for a PBS documentary on Iceland. Translated as "Thanks…," the album kicks off with a short title track that meanders its way into the gorgeous "Glósóli." If you haven't seen it on mtvU, check out the music video. That was what got me hooked in early February. A drummer boy leads a group of youth across a cinematic countryside in a Peter-Pan-meets-Revolutionary-War short film. "Hoppípolla" has the most memorable lyrics Sigur Rós has ever penned, if just for Birgisson's utterance of the title.
But it seems as if everything builds toward "Sæglópur," the album's centerpiece and the only Sigur Rós song I've found myself dancing to. Watch out. After the piano intro, you might seriously break your hip when the whole band joins in. All right, maybe not; but at least now you'll think about all 300,000 people in Iceland dancing along as a man pulls a bow across an electric guitar and sings in a fake language; and that's something I look for in everything.
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Dylan-Ernst Schäfer's column "The Needle" runs on Thursdays. To comment on this article, e-mail dtrojan@usc.edu or call (213) 740-5644.
