Song of the Day #244 - Sigur Rós - Svefn-g-englar

Ég flýt um í neðarsjávar hýði
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L64BcCRDAE

Okay so today was cold and I had to do a bunch of work outside so forget everything I said in my last post, winter sucks, and no amount of aestheticizing is gonna overcome that. But then after I took a nap and listened to post rock so we're all good again. Here's another great winter song, one that sounds to me like sonar being sent from deep within the heart of a glacier that's submerged in infinite dark water, but it is also a warm rumbling comforting song, basically the ideal atmosphere for the ideal activity of the season (the aforementioned HUIBITDLTWCMWLTTWHO).

I think this is the first Sigur Ros song I've featured on my blog, even though for a long time they were probably my second favorite band (after Radiohead). They're very difficult to write about; you find yourself retreating to the same tired statements about "ethereal" or else end up with some nonsense about glaciers and sonar and for some reason whales. You really want to buy the idea of the band as some post-human angelic entity from mythic Iceland, but then you have to reconcile that with them being on The Simpsons and unashamedly producing terrible dog movies (two of them!). This is the bleak world we live in, money exists, etc etc.

I really don't have a lot I can say about this. The experience is not something you can really put into words, which is part of the appeal. It's something beyond. Having said that, the lyrics are really nice. The punned duality of angels and sleepwalkers is interesting, like, the innocence or something, I guess? It's a good feeling overall, I think. Feels sorta like a late-stage Evangelion episode, which means we can either end this one here or it will be fifteen more paragraphs.