Quick, Before It Melts.

It's not a secret that by now, many bloggers and music critics are contemplating--if not spread-sheet building and playlist-analyzing--their year-end best-of lists. Yours truly has opted to stay away from the blogger forums where past experience tells me, year-end discussion is beginning to spread faster than viral YouTube video of panty-less pop starlets. Curiosity is killing me, but I've been trying to focus on the crop of new music that's coming out this fall, rather than going back and examining the year's releases so far. Having said that, I do have some inkling of what my year end lists are going to look like, and can pretty much guarantee that Sigur Rós is going to be up there near the top.

I first heard their spectral, otherworldly music when I cold-purchased (that's buying without hearing first) Ágætis byrjun, their second album, which introduced the band to the world outside their native Iceland. I think of that album in the same terms I think of Kid A because they were both of the same place and time for me. I don't go back to the Radiohead album as often as I go back to Ágætis byrjun, though. The allure of Sigur Rós is that the music exudes a timeless quality that sets it apart almost instantaneously; it never sounds like any of it's contemporaries.

This year I've found myself in a constant Sigur Rós orbit around their latest CD, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, which translates to "With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly". The buzz is justified: this is Sigur Rós's most accessible album (their first to feature singing in English), yet still retains that distinctiveness that has been the hallmark of their sound. It irks me when I hear them referred to as a "soundtrack" band, because that almost implies they're little more than background music. If you can get past the fact that the lyrics won't make any sense to you (and sometimes they don't make any sense to Icelandic speaking fans, either), then you'll get to enjoy the music based solely on emotion alone. You'll feel it, and understand it on a level that personalizes it, rather than contextualizing it based on cultural preconceptions. A friend commented--after I described the band this way--that, Sigur Rós is akin to "world music" but I don't agree with that. "World Music" as I see it, stems from tradition and history; Sigur Rós don't play based on Icelandic cultural tradition. They are not Icelandic roots music. They have truly developed in a world separate from our own, yet still visible to us. We can look into their alternate universe through a frost glass bubble. Or perhaps, they're looking out as us through that same bubble, marveling at our seemingly alien world.

Sigur Rós play Toronto's Massey Hall tonight.

MP3: Sigur Rós "Gobbledigook"
Video: Sigur Rós "Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur"
Myspace: Sigur Rós