The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway - GenesisĢ0. Caetano Veloso & Gilberto Gil – Tropicalia 2ġ. Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci – The Blue TreesĢ4. Gary Burton & Chick Corea – Crystal SilenceĢ1. Joni Mitchell – Hissing of Summer Lawnsġ3. Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Don’t Stand Me Downĩ. Mostly resticted to one album per artist to give it a bit of (false) variety:ġ. These are mostly albums I've been listening to for 10 years or more (and a lot of them are just cassette copies that I've been hammering for that long).
Single albums only so not as much soul as there might (nor jazz for that matter). Which means that "Good Start" might as well become of the most charming understatements to come out of a band in years.I find the individual lists more interesting than the thought of compiling everything into a top100. Rarely has a sophomore effort sounded this thick and surprising. As expected, though, the band's keen sense of Sturm und Drang is mostly contained within an elegant scope of melodies for the remainder of this follow-up. Take "Hjartað Hamast (Bamm Bamm Bamm)," for instance: there are so many layers of heavy strings, dense atmospherics, and fading vocals that it becomes an ineffectual mess of styles over style. However, at its worst, the album sometimes slides into an almost overkill of sonic structures. At its best, the album seems to accomplish everything lagging post-shoegazers like Spiritualized or Chapterhouse once promised. One will constantly be waiting to hear what fascinating turns such complex musicianship will take at a moment's notice.
Extremely deep strings underpin falsetto wails from the mournfully epic ("Viðar Vel Tl Loftárasa") to the unreservedly cinematic ("Avalon"). The rest of this full-length follows such similar quality. After an introduction just this side of one of the aforementioned Stone Roses' backward beauties, the album pumps in the morning mist with "Sven-G-Englar" - a song of such accomplished gorgeousness that one wonders why such a tiny country as Iceland can musically outperform entire continents in just a few short minutes. Indeed, Ágætis Byrjun pulls no punches from the start. So as talented as Von might have been, this time out is probably even more worthy of dramatic debut expectations.
This second album - Ágætis Byrjun - translates roughly to Good Start. Even on aesthetic matters, Sigur Rós entitle their sophomore effort not in a manner to play up the irony of high expectations (à la the Stone Roses' Second Coming), but in a modest realization. By this time, the band recruited in a new keyboardist by the name of Kjartan Sveinsson and it seems to have done nothing but take the band to an even higher state of self-awareness.
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