The hiatus seems to have done the trick: “Takk” is as uplifting and accessible as “( )” was cold, ponderous and at times almost purposefully bled of meaning, as attested to by its accompanying 12-page booklet of entirely blank pages. We weren’t going to compromise because we didn’t feel like it.” We’ve never been in that situation, which is something I’m really grateful for. If you live in Seattle or New York and you form a band, you’re gonna make it - that’s the purpose, and you’ll do anything to get there. “Bjork is a sort of international star, but for us our anonymity is actually kind of protected. “One of the privileges of being from Iceland, a small community, is that there’s no industry,” continues Sveinsson. So our second album was kinda depressing, if you will.”īut they took a year off and returned to Iceland to regroup and recharge.
#Sigur ros agaetis byrjun meaning plus
“And then we were signing record deals and publishing deals, and there were all these people around us - plus speaking another language all the time. “Before, we’d probably tour for a couple of months at a time, and much more hardcore - not as comfortable as we can today,” says Sveinsson. Call it sustainable living for the international music circuit. They return to Iceland every three weeks, where bassist Georg Holm has a young daughter, and they all check in regularly with family and friends. It’s not exactly throwing it out the window though.” Sometimes Orri when he’s drunk, he might, you know, move a Lazyboy chair between floors in a hotel. “There’s no groupies, no drugs an occasional beer. “We’re really bad rock stars,” Sveinsson acknowledges. Or could it be that they wanted to eschew the more traditional rock trappings of fame and bid instead to be the calmest rock stars on the planet? So if by “changing music” Sigur Ros meant doing it their way, things are going fine - though it’s hardly a groundbreaking goal. They generally resist media photo shoots (the shots in Tokyo were the first they had agreed to do in six months) and their latest video, for “Saeglopur” from “Takk” was another self-directed effort, something their international label EMI seems resigned to letting its prodigies get away with fairly often, especially after the band won Best Video at the MTV Europe Music Awards in 2003. So we learn to let go a little, and they learn you can try alternative ways of doing things.” And then suddenly you get a band like us. “It’s hard for the record labels, too, because these big labels have a way of doing things. “I’m sure we were difficult, and I think we still are sometimes,” Sveinsson admits. They insisted on making all their own videos, titled one of their albums an unpronounceable “( )” - as much to misanthropically mess with radio DJs as anything else - and for a long time grunted monosyllabically in interviews, to the point that they once reportedly reduced a reporter to exclaiming, “I got nothing! I got nothing!” The band’s reputation for obtuseness in their journey from Reykjavik obscurity to music-industry hype and then 2-million-plus worldwide album sales following the international release of their sophomore effort, 1999’s “Agaetis Byrjun,” is well documented. That was kind of in our way, a little bit.”
We’ve also realized that we can’t be on top of everything.
“We’re kinda used to this stuff now, this music, this lifestyle, all of it, it’s all getting easier. “Maybe it’s age,” says keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, all of 27 years young, in Tokyo recently where Sigur Ros played two shows in support of their most recent album, “Takk” (meaning “thanks”). So were they joking all along? Has fame actually grounded Iceland’s second-most-famous musical export, by achieving the opposite effect to that it has so often had on rock stars slurring that they’re going to save the world even as the rehab door bangs shut in their face?
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