The dashing hero of a Russian romantic novel poses a question to his traveling companion: “It was the French, I suppose, who made boredom fashionable?”
“No, the English,” the companion replies.
Surprisingly, both were wrong. Neither the Francos or the Anglos live in a locale quite northerly enough to facilitate truly mind-numbing boredom. A group of Canadians and a group of Icelanders proved such ennui is the exclusive domain of the world’s permafrosted latitudes?musically, anyway.
Rejkjavik’s Sigur Ros and Toronto’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor both released new albums, titled ( ) and Yanqui U.X.O. respectively, in recent weeks. Each features music of extraordinary drama, but more often borders on extraordinary pretension, which eventually leaves the listeners wondering “What is all the fuss about?”
Sigur Ros’ most popular song to date, “Svefn-g-englar,” features sublime keyboard drone, bowed guitar noise and semi-intelligible lyrics. The chorus sounds something like “It’s yooo-hoo,” and that is certainly what the English-speaking world cried out while listening to the record alone and drowning in self-pity. They could cry out, so they bought the record. So the real measure of Sigur Ros’ success on the new album, then, is whether a similarly familiar and pronounceable Icelandic phrase can hook the world.
Unfortunately, the best they could come up with is “You siphon” on the fourth track, so the band is forced to rely on the sublime keyboards and bowed guitar noise. That song is the standout, the track with a halfway memorable melody and lyrical hook. A very nice organ part rounds out the mix. The opening track fares nearly as well?the somber piano, reminiscent of Beethoven’s “Pathetique,” together with Jon Thor Birgisson’s moans, leaves quite the ethereal impression.
Sadly, unforgivable fits of pretension are endemic to the effort. The album has an unpronounceable title?strike one. None of the album’s eight lengthy tracks have a title?strike two. And all 12 pages of the album’s liner notes are blank?strike three, guys. You’re full of yourselves.
Godspeed fares no better on the pretension front: A scribbled chart on the album’s back tries to make the case for a seven-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-esque connection between major record companies and major defense concerns Boeing, Raytheon and General Dynamics. To put too fine a point on it, a cryptic note inside notes that “u.x.o. is unexploded ordnance is landmines is cluster bombs. yanqui is post-colonial imperialism is police state is multinational corporate oligarchy. godspeed you! black emperor is complicit is guilty is resisting. the new album is just music.”
Right. Throughout the album, it hard to shake the feeling that the band is sitting somewhere thinking, “Our music’s too important for words,” and the music’s overburdening self-importance doesn’t help. Godspeed deals in, for lack of a better term, orchestral rock. Unfortunately, the band’s command of orchestral forms relies heavily on dynamic shifts, to the neglect of melody, harmony, rhythm or any other source of tension or drama, let alone lyrics. And when your five tracks (actually, three?two are split in half) average 15 minutes apiece, you need something more than getting loud and getting soft to maintain the listener’s attention.
By any measure, these albums make very nice background music, perhaps while reading Russian romanticism alone, wallowing in boredom. If only these two bands had done just that, instead of doing their wallowing in the studio.
