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. Amg: Two years passed since Sigur Rós' debut.