First post! Sigur Ros - ( )

Hi! My name is Darick, but my friends call me Deekay. You can call me Deekay too. Don't worry, you aren't being presumptuous in doing so.

I love music. In fact, I love music so much that I am not content with simply listening to it. I have to think about it, and now, write about it too. Every day (or as often as possible), I will set my iTunes on shuffle and write about the album that pops up. My taste in music is more or less indiscriminate, and my collection is large and growing. Actually, there is a lot of music loaded into iTunes that I haven't even gotten around to listening to yet. So I suppose this blog is as much a personal record of my own explorations as it is something I would like to share with other enthusiasts.

Today's album: Sigur Ros - ( )
Genre(s): Indie, Post-Rock, Ambient
Released: October, 2002
Running Time: 8 tracks, 1:11:47
In a nutshell: Zzzzzzzzz....

There are a lot of Sigur Ros fans out there, I suppose. I'm not really one of them, but I'll admit that it's very good music. This particular album isn't really doing much for me.

I think Sigur Ros both epitomizes, and somewhat evades the post-rock genre. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, post-rock refers to instrumental rock which usually focuses on a quiet-loud-quiet formula to create a sense of drama. Unlike ambient music, which will lie quietly in the background until the listener chooses to pluck interesting details from it, post-rock tends to slowly creep up on you, eventually hitting you with something loud and dramatic. Sigur Ros often manages to evade the post-rock label because of its strange vocals, crooned in a made up language. The vocals give Sigur Ros a poppier sound on other albums, making them more immediately rewarding.

But not on ( ). This album has all the post-rock build-up with none of the character. I would suggest only listening to track 7, which is the album's 13 minute magnum opus. The track starts with cold ambiance coupled with slow, melancholic vocals. As the instrumentation builds up in volume, the pace never changes. Much of the album is like this, making the listener sift through endless shades of gray. You have to be in a specific mood to listen to this, and even then it is probably better to just have it on in the background.