Revisit of the Week - Sigur Rós - Von (1997)
The most fascinating thing about Sigur Rós' typically-forgotten debut album Von is the fifth song, "Myrkur".
Von, generally speaking, is quite far away from the sound that we associate from Sigur Rós - that orchestral, crescendo-heavy and dream-like post-rock which they'd already adopt on the follow-up album couple of years later. Instead, this is pretty much an ambient album - the whole record opens up with ten minutes of pure dark ambient straight from a horror movie cavern and it rarely gets out of that mindset. There's a lot more emphasis on soundscapes, so much in fact that huge parts of the album's chunky 72 minutes are more ambience than ambient, like you're closing your eyes and listening to the incidental sounds of the environment you're in - some of it is even literal silence. It takes the album about sixteen minutes to indicate that there is actually a four-member band here, and the couple of songs like "Hún Jörð…" where they get that textural post-rock band dynamic going are the bits that remind you who you're listening to. But, even so, all this dungeon background texture does still link in a little to the Sigur Rós we know and love, who would continue to appreciate atmosphere and slow-building scene-setting going forward. Starting with an ambient album isn't too much of a stretch.
But then you get to "Myrkur" and you are suddenly transported into a bewildering what-if scenario which presents an alternative timeline for the band: one where they end up becoming a shoegaze band. "Myrkur" is pure early 90s guitar floating and it never ceases to be a small mindscrew, because this just is not a mode of operation that you would ever expect from this band (and let's face it, absolutely no one ever is going to listen to this album before most if not all of the others).
"Myrkur" is by and far the best thing on Von. There's a really good reason why everyone, including the band themselves, largely just forget this record exists. Sigur Rós weren't happy how it turned out - it took an extraordinary long time to put together with zero budget and ultimately the final result was so different to what they had in mind that they considered binning the whole thing altogether. By the time it was released they were already standing in a completely different place musically, as evidenced by how 1999's sophomore breakthrough Ágætis byrjun sounds like the work of an entirely different band. Unlike many underdog debuts you rarely find anyone raving on about Von being an undersung gem, and that's because it really isn't that interesting of an album. The ambient patterns it bears aren't particularly captivating, the long song lengths come across as needlessly meandering rather than working to build something larger and meaningful, and whenever you do get to hear the band play you're witnessing a group so obviously still in the demo stage figuring their thing out. It's an album that somehow sounds under- and over-baked at the same time, amateurish in places and trying too hard to impress in others, both sides connected by a lack of overall vision and focus. It's a chore to get through at times - and this is a genre that is practically defined by long albums.
But it has "Myrkur", which is just such a fascinating piece of archeological evidence of how young bands search for their own sound while navigating through their various influences. It also, simply put, stands out massively in its sound alone and for that grabs your attention - and if you squint you can even call it a minor bop. Oh, and Von also has a really cool translucent purple jewel case, which is the album's other highlight. I love it whenever artists do something a bit different with the standard ol' jewel case.
(it's bothering me that I can't remember where I bought Von. I remember it being somewhere in Europe, in a small record shop that I stumbled onto by accident - and that I was so gobsmacked to see a copy of this there that I bought it despite a higher than average price tag. I just can't remember where. Germany maybe, or Denmark?)
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