Ágætis byrjun

Ten tracks in about seventy-two minutes, and the method is slowness: the long approach is how most of these pieces reach what they reach, so length alone is not charged. The frame is compelled, a brief opening and the slow Avalon at the close, together under a tenth of the running time. Svefn-g-englar must come first, since it sets the scale. The test bites in three places. Hjartað hamast, the one organ-driven rock song, could go with little loss. Olsen Olsen adds height more than a turn. And the long quiet tails of Viðrar vel and Flugufrelsarinn could lose a third without loss.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Disclosure through sound is credited fully, and this record’s is real: a state of nascence, the world heard as if for the first time, wonder and fragility in one breath. The titles articulate it: the record is called “a good beginning”, Svefn-g-englar makes sleepwalkers into angels, and Ný batterí is new batteries. Viðrar vel til loftárása, good weather for air strikes, sets a phrase about war weather over the record’s most tender music, the nearest it comes to a stated condition. What holds the figure is the distinction the axis draws: this is disclosure of a mood more than of a meaning. The words are heard as voice rather than claim.

Score: 7.4 / 10

Elevation is the record’s chief good, and it comes on nearly every song. Svefn-g-englar rises from a pinging stillness into falsetto over bowed guitar, a slow and immense swell. Starálfur is the warmest height, lifted by its strings. Ný batterí climbs from a dark bowed opening to brass and drums at full weight, the one height with terror in it. Viðrar vel til loftárása is the summit: piano and strings, a long build, a release that opens wide. Olsen Olsen ends in a massed choral lift. What holds the figure under Kind of Blue at 9.1 is that the heights are mostly of one kind, the slow swell to release, and the method is legible by its third use.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Myth is evoked richly and built only through sequence and titles. The figures are old ones: angels and sleepwalkers, an elf, a liberator of flies, and at the close Avalon, where the wounded king is carried and does not die. Read as a sequence the record makes a passage, from a good beginning and a sleepwalker’s waking to a last track named for the isle of the blessed, its music slowed toward stillness: birth to the otherworld. The frame is the record’s own. What holds the axis well below the bar is that no figure bears it. No person, place or story is audible to a listener without the Icelandic, and the archetypes stay atmosphere, evoked rather than built.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The inheritance is broad and close at hand: the slow crescendo of post-rock (Talk Talk’s late records, Slint, Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor), the voice as texture of the Cocteau Twins, the wash of shoegaze, ambient practice after Eno, and the band’s own first record, Von (1997). The turn is to make post-rock’s austere crescendo lyrical and orchestral: strings and brass, a falsetto as lead instrument, the bowed guitar as a voice rather than a noise. The stake was real but not large: a small band on a small label in a small language. What holds the figure is the path: each element was proven, and the swerve is the joining, and its warmth.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because what it knows is a timescale. A record about beginning is built of pieces that begin from almost nothing and take minutes to arrive: Svefn-g-englar’s pinging keyboard stands a long while before anything else enters, and the arrival is its subject. The sequence runs from a brief opening through the long rising songs to a close slowed toward stillness. What holds the figure is one shape repeated: in the middle, in Flugufrelsarinn, Hjartað hamast and Olsen Olsen, the form is nearer a container the songs are poured into than an instrument each requires.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Evidence first, over twenty-seven years. The record has been returned to steadily: it remains the band’s central album, its songs have been carried into film and television, and an anniversary edition reopened its making in 2019. Return repays in the sound: the layers of bowed guitar, strings and keyboard separate on close listening, and the builds of Viðrar vel and Ný batterí keep yielding detail. The semantic yield is narrower. For most listeners the words are voice, so what the record means on the tenth hearing is close to what it meant on the first, The depth is real in the formal register and modest in the semantic one.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The field is the rock and post-rock album of the late 1990s. It showed that the post-rock crescendo could carry orchestral warmth, melody and a lead voice without becoming conventional song, and that a record sung in Icelandic could be heard internationally on the strength of its sound. That widened the idiom more than it reorganised it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the bowed guitar, the falsetto and the slow orchestral swell became a common language of the 2000s, above all in the scoring of trailers, documentaries and advertising, and the record opened an international path for Icelandic music beyond Björk; much of that is use rather than redirection. It sits below Remain in Light at 8.5 and above Zooropa at 7.4.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Survival is weighed over twenty-seven years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, has stayed in print, and was reissued in an expanded edition at twenty. Presence is continuous and wide for a record of its kind: it is heard whole, its songs carried in film and broadcast, and it is commonly placed among the records of its decade, popularity counted as presence, not proof. The fabric is little fixed to 1999, with no period drum machine or production fashion to date it. What holds the figure is a presence narrower than that of the decade’s records with the largest public, and much of it fragmentary use in other media.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The making is load-bearing in the textures. The bowed guitar, treated with reverb until it sounds like a struck and sustained string section, gives Svefn-g-englar and Ný batterí their substance; the strings of Starálfur carry the song rather than decorate it; the brass entry in Ný batterí and the release in Viðrar vel are timed and balanced so that the scale is felt and the mix stays clear. The costs fall across the record: plain and sometimes heavy-footed drumming, one dynamic shape so that the craft repeats its solution, an ordinary arrangement in Hjartað hamast, a falsetto that stays in one register. Below Remain in Light at 8.7, a little above Zooropa at 8.2.

Score: 8.4 / 10

One law governs the record: sound emerging from near silence toward a swell, with the voice as one instrument inside it and wonder as the tone. Take the two most distant elements, the brief, faint opening, which is the law’s seed, and the organ-and-drums push of Hjartað hamast, its most worldly case, which strains the law without breaking it. Ný batterí’s darker, heavier register and the tenderness of Viðrar vel are the same swell in two moods. What holds the figure is narrowness: the range of mode is moderate and the shape of each piece is largely one shape, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held fully, as wonder, waking and the edge of sleep. Birth and childhood are present in the titles and in the sound’s sense of beginning. The sacred enters as angels and as the otherworld of Avalon; the natural order through weather, flies and an elf of folk belief, by tone more than by statement. War appears once, in a title. What holds the figure is that most of these orders arrive as a word or an image and are carried by mood, and the family, labour, the state and history are absent or only glimpsed. A little above m b v at 6.6, below Low at 7.2.

Score: 6.8 / 10