Fút ert óóret komin fir grat…

[Video][Website]
[4.50]

Alfred Soto: Spectral, luminous, unearthly. I never want to hear it again.
[3]

Zach Lyon: Do you like Sigur Rós? Then you might like this song. Do you dislike Sigur Rós? Then you might dislike this song.
[5]

Brad Shoup: At what point did they decide to write songs comprised chiefly of outros?
[4]

Anthony Easton: Scandinavian Easter, you know, with the snow breaking apart and the grass growing out of the lichen-encrusted rocks, but sadder — so sad, in fact, that it leans ever so slightly towards camp (at almost 7 minutes long, maybe more than slightly towards camp).
[6]

Iain Mew: I’ve never really done the thing of revolting against my own past music taste. I listen to new music most of the time but can and do happily listen to many bands that I did as a teenager and in some cases still follow their new stuff. Sigur Rós’ Ágætis Byrjun and () are big exceptions, though. I loved them so much once, but now they  sound faintly silly, stranded in another time. Maybe it’s the nature of the band’s blank, open-ended emotion which allowed me to imprint my own experiences and feelings onto them so much harder. Their later stuff, of course, has everyone else’s big emotional experiences imprinted onto it via the medium of TV. The most positive thing that I can say about this one is that it seems too uneventful to suffer death by a million soundtracks in the same way.
[4]

Jer Fairall: Abstract: “The Thugs vs. The Castrati: Exploring Genre, Taste and Masculinity in the White Male Voice of Millennial Popular Music” (2001).  Attempting to reassemble itself in the final years of the tumult of the 1990s, a decade in which the male voice had been redefined in popular music through the such upheavals, early in the decade, as Kurt Cobain’s storming of the gates of the mainstream (and the gulf that his subsequent suicide left in the landscape that it had redefined only a few short years prior) and the rise in hip hop as one of pop’s dominant art forms. Reeling from these influences by the end of the decade, the white male voice was left to reconstruct itself in response to the aggression and confidence of rap alongside the sensitivity and non-judgemental “otherness” that Cobain’s “alternative” revolution ushered in, albeit briefly and with many concessions. Feeling inadequately matched to the former and put off by the feminizing effects of the latter (and the simultaneous onslaught of the new wave of boy bands,) white male-voiced pop music, circa 1999, responded by cranking up its own aggression and confidence to cartoonish levels, resulting in a new breed of male rock stars–Fred Durst, Kid Rock, the dreadlocked hooligans of Korn–that waved violence, misogyny and proud ignorance as a cudgel. All incorporating rap to a considerable degree, at the top of this heap was white rapper Eminem, whose ongoing cornucopia of controversies flew brazenly in the face of the New Tolerance, a movement that found its new, reactionary, quiet voice in the ascension of a handful of popular, critically acclaimed European acts in the very early years of the new century. The high, polite and often androgynous voices of Thom Yorke, Chris Martin and Sigur Ros’ Jonsi Birgisson suddenly acted as a counter to the blunt thuggishness of America’s most popular white male vocalists, crafting a movement that offered consolation to listeners disenfranchised or, more often, excluded, from the sound of white America as it existed in the millennial era. Does “otherness” now constitute, in its growing representation, a new strain in the mainstream of masculinity? Do these competing notions of masculinity have any hope of coexisting? This paper will explore the ways in which this schism, as played out in our music, has redefined and reshaped the state of white male masculinity in the millennial era, or whether alternatives, no matter how great in numbers, are forever destined to remain just that.
[5]