Before Sigur Ros won the inaugural Shortlist Prize in 2001 for Agaetis Byrjun, they composed another album that would have met the award's criteria. Fewer than 500,000 copies sold? Hell, Von initially printed less than 500. A shining example of sacrosanct iconoclasm? Truly. Kitschy and tongue-in-cheek enough to win over Jack Black (who this year championed Eagles of Death Metal as his sole nomination)? Well, they're Icelandic.
Around the release of Agaetis Byrjun, Sigur Ros promised to "change music...and the way people think about music" forever. Whereas on that record-- nestled cozily inside a fully realized voice-- they sounded up to the task, Von is weighted down by the band's bodacious ambition. At 72 minutes, the album is bloated with ideas Sigur Ros would refine on their sophomore outing. As such, it's an exciting look back at a once-mysterious group who leaped from obscurity to mug the mainstream. Young, earnest, eerie, and overzealous, Von is a unique, almost belligerently unaffiliated piece of music that unsubtly blazons its idiosyncrasies.
Naturally, Von kicks off with a bold mission statement: "Sigur Ros", which is purposefully stagnant and entirely too long. At more than nine minutes in length, the track is an ambient impasse, a slow-moving mass of nothing much. Imagine the nebulous prelude of Agaetis Byrjun opener "Intro" stretched to 10 times its original length and without a tension-breaker like "Sven-G-Englar" to empty into. "Dogun" prolongs the shapelessness, though in a slightly more affable fashion: The song features the sort of ethereal, reverb-laden choral intonations that tread the fenceline between blissed-out psych and Enya-style therapop. But the voices are eventually fed through a voicebox and garbled beyond recognition, establishing Sigur Ros on the edgier side of the divide.
Things don't really get off the ground until "Hun Jord". Centered around a harrowing vocal refrain, the song paints with darker hues than Sigur Ros' newer material, but still bears the band's unmistakable emblem. Tape splices chatter through the opening section before a sludgy guitar and martial drums enter to pilot the fracas. Uncharacteristically, one can actually hear a well-defined set of reference points here, including Mogwai, Hawkwind, and Spacemen 3.
For the most part, however, Von is very distant from its time. Even in its most conventional moments, Von sounds utterly unlike anything from the period, and is only tentatively allusive of the band's fecund latter-day output. "Myrkur", though redolent of Pink Floyd and Hum, is happily and naively detached. Much like Agaetis Byrjun, Von thrives on a certain amount of landscaping-- wandering the Icelandic countryside is a surreal and uncanny experience, one that Sigur Ros convey beautifully. But in sounding so consciously epic, the album comes across more self-aware-- and thus less powerful-- than its offspring. Rather, it's a rugged, cave-dwelling cousin to Agaetis Byrjun's stargazing hopefulness and environmentalism.
