Here I Am, Stuffing Your Throats.

Something Grace said set me off on this one. I was minding my own business, watching Youtube videos about vacuum cleaners (some of them are really quite fascinating, especially the one that sounds like Chewbacca), when I remembered something.
I believe it was the other day, at KLpac, where Grace, her college mate Boon Ken and myself were waiting for the Club 8 and Pelle Carlberg concert to start (I have given up hope of ever blogging about the kick arse experience, so you can just head over to Boon Ken's page and read his account of it ,which is full of lotsa big impressive music reviewer-ish words which makes me oh-so ashamed of my own sad little bloggie).
But I digress.
So Grace (whose word is the Gospel, remember..) told Boon Ken something along the lines of "Vanessa stuffs Sigur ros down the throats of everyone she knows."

Which is so extremely true.
In terms of literature, I stuff Diana Wynne Jones down people's throats.
In terms of TV, I stuff Heroes down people's throats.
And in terms of music, I stuff Sigur ros down people's throats.

In fact, you cannot claim to really know me unless I have attempted to stuff Sigur ros down your throat at least once in the course of our friendship/acquaintance/affair.
During instant messaging sessions I discreetly/obviously send links to videos and mp3s. I stuff mix CDs full of Sigur ros tracks and call them mix CDs. I blab about Sigur ros for 20 minutes at a stretch. Ask me too many questions and it becomes an hour (give or take).
I am proud to say that in the terms of converting people to the music of Sigur ros, I have a 62.5% success rate, and no, I did not make that percentage up. I used a calculator.

It amazed me really, that I have never actually raved about them on Blogeddy Blog Blog. After all, I did steal me blog URL from one of their song titles.
So here I go.
I am going to stuff these guys down your throats, and you are going to like it.





Why Sigur ros Is The Coolest Band On The Planet.



1. They're Icelandic. And everyone knows Iceland is like, the coolest place on Earth.

2. JónsiBirgisson (vocals, guitar) is blind in one eye. I don't know why that makes him cool but it just does.

3. Georg (bass) can catch fish with his teeth. Awesomeness.

4. Jónsi once fronted an even weirder band named the Bee Spiders. Kjartan(piano/keyboards/a bunch of other stuff) joined him as a female backup singer, Tina Turner style.

5. The strings in the song Starálfur are a musical palindrome. They sound exactly the same when played backward. I think that's cooooool.

6. Jónsi plays his guitar with a cello bow.


Apparently some other band used it first, Led Zeppelin or something like that, but Sigur ros use it for practically every song. And there's another track where the bass guitar is played with a drumstick.
And they make it sound oh-so-spectacularly cool.

7. The band members all adore Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen is cool. Sigur ros obviously understand the depths and mechanics of coolness. Which makes them even cooler.

8. They have the coolest album art. Ever.

Don't even tell me that isn't cool.

9. They sing in a language that doesn't exist. Most of the time it's in Icelandic, but on a fair number of tracks Jonsi sings in Hopelandic, or vonlenska, which isn't a real language at all. There is no vocabulary or grammar to it, merely a set of gibberish sounds that fit with the music. And has Jonsi himself says, he could be singing bullshit, for all he knows. Now that's cool.

10. Nobody speaks Icelandic, let alone Hopelandic. So you can blast their stuff at maximum volume and not a soul will know when Jonsi is singing cuss words, which he sometimes does.

11. Jonsi's voice, combined with the other instruments, produce a sound so ethereal and magnificent it's almost as if the music were born of Middle Earth, or Pluto, or Atlantis, or something. And everybody knows that Middle Earth(and Pluto and Atlantis) is the supreme cool.

12. They rarely ever give interviews, and turned down a very lucrative deal with some American record company in favour of a much less profitable contract with mca records which offered them complete artistic freedom. Music over money,anyday. That's mucho cool.

13. They make the awesomest music videos in living memory.


14. They are one of the few bands who have entered my exclusive list of Musical Acts I Must See Live Or Die Trying.





But seriously though.
Sigur ros comes with my very highest recommendation. Please do give them a try,if you haven't already. Who knows? They might be your new favourite band of all time.





Here's their official site, which is really quite good.
Or you can watch some of their kick arse music videos here, which are truly works of art in their own right.
And then you can download their songs here.

I believe my work here is done.




Edit: One Icelandic journalist who attended a Sigur ros show apprently found it so indescribably beautiful that she had to run to the bathroom and throw up. Now, there's your ultimate reason to give these four skinny dudes a listen.