Having now listened to Sigur Rós’s
Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
several times in the past few days, I am struck by my aural “blindness” and
craze for lyrics. As some of you may know, I have a tendency to dismiss songs
with terrible lyrics. Some of my dismissals aren’t entirely forgivable, but I’d
be more than happy to battle for a few of them. (“Are we human / or are we
dancer?”—really, Brandon Flowers, what the f—k does that mean!?)
The first time I really struggled
with “letting go” of the lyrics was with Bon Iver. Justin Vernon has probably
the worst elocution of all time. In fact, for a long time, I thought the lyric
was “jagged fingers thick with ice”…not “vacance.”
Vacance, by the way, isn’t even much of a real word. But the words, as it turns
out, are never terribly important when I listen to Bon Iver. They are merely
carriers for the power of the melodic message. Jonah Weiner, on Slate.com,
explained it well when he said,
This is actually kind of the way that I hear, and appreciate, Bon
Iver’s music—his words are painful on the page, but in Justin Vernon’s delivery
they’re far too gauzy to really register, much less annoy me and get in the way
of my enjoyment of, say, that insistent, plaintive riff on “Holocene,” which
only gathers intensity as the song goes.
~
I find—no matter how much
attention I pay to the lyrics—that this is exactly how I connect with Vernon’s
music. I don’t connect with the lyrical content so much as the delivery of that lyrical content. As it
turns out, because Sigur Rós’s lyrics are either gibberish or in Icelandic,
there’s a whole lot of space for appreciating that delivery if you’re an
English speaker. Perhaps the experience is different as a native speaker of
Icelandic (or gibberish?), but all I know is that I have an experience of
complete melodic understanding.
And Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust hits hard on all kinds of
melodic levels; although it maintains a steady exoticism (it is in Icelandic
except for closer “All Alright”) and an extraordinarily clean production, the
album hits a huge range of emotional notes. “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur”
touches on a restrained exuberance; “Við spilum endalaust” maintains a solemn,
celebratory bombast. But then “Festival”—which leads off with singer Jónsi’s
aching, almost fragile falsetto sailing over shimmery keyboards for the first
four minutes—drops into that tremendous bass line and then takes off for outer
space. It’s a cautious, beautiful tune for the first half and then an arena
rocker the rest of the nine minutes. The almost equally long “Ára bátur,”
replete with choral voices, a string section, horns, and orchestra percussion,
might pass as a movement from a symphony.
But I’d have to look back to “Festival”
as my favorite track on the album—especially given that it was struck in my
head for some 48 hours while in the midst of traveling to and being oriented
about Edinburgh, Scotland. Perhaps the repetitive bass line sounds like a bit
of a chore as something to have careening around your skull while racing through
Heathrow Airport, but the song was anything but dull. Once you have some
adrenaline going, even the memory of
the epic last half hits you like a freight train.
~
Anyways, part of the point of
this entry is to explain my long and somewhat egregious absence from the blog—6
days being (surprisingly!) the longest stretch yet without a post since the
establishment of the somewhat followed Pueblo Waltz. Anyways, I think you all
have something of a treat in store, because I will be spending quite a bit of
time this semester roaming the more musical of the Edinburgh pubs, searching
out fun music that I can pass along to you. Also…no Saturday Songs tomorrow. I
haven’t had much time in the past week for listening to new music, but I do
promise an installment next week.
Cheers!
No comments:
Post a Comment