Sigur Ros and Work Listening

Sigur Ros live














Ný batterí (2000)

I just listened to the four tracks on this single while putting the finishing touches on a report. It was saved to my HD as "EP" but I realized it's a single.



I have a mental shorthand where I classify Sigur Ros tracks as either purely ambient "sound" or "song-based." It's a little easy because, really, they're all songs. Maybe I can explain...

The first song of theirs I really noticed was Staralfur, from the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou...

I went to the trouble of locating the track and putting it on my own personal copy of the Zissou soundtrack. For reasons I've never learned, this song, played over the pivotal moment of the movie, literally underscoring the climax, isn't on the soundtrack...

So I knew of these guys and liked them, but at the time I didn't really pursue them beyond this...

One night I was waiting outside our grocery store as my wife searched (fruitlessly) for Ginger Beer (Dark n' Stormys). A song came on our local college radio station which I recognized as the Icelanders. Lead singer Jónsi's voice is nothing if not completely distinct. In the coming days, I spent some time on the XPN website poring over playlists trying to figure out which song it was. This took some determined effort, as the lyrics are in Icelandic or worse, and all I had to compare was my recollection of the character of the song. When I finally found it, I realized I had jumped into their 2005 album Takk..., which has most of my favorite Sigur Ros "songs."

You really need to hear this record in sequence, tracks 1-5 work together seamlessly.


1. Takk...

2. Glósóli

3. Hoppípolla

4. Með blóðnasir

5. Sé lest


It's just gorgeous.

Sé lest was the song I heard outside of Giant that night. Fortunately it has that "circus comes to town" feel at the end which I remembered from listening.

These are more of the "song" songs. The albums Ágætis byrjun and Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust are to my view, similar to Takk... in that regard.

But the point of this post is "work listening." I notice a lot of times that at work I can't listen to anything too structured. Song-based music is good a lot of the time, but sometimes I find myself reaching for something looser, like jazz. Books on CD and generally, podcasts, are right out.

In this vein, the Sigur Ros album I most reach for is () from 2002. The songs are much less structured than on any of their albums, less hooky...and I love that. I actually go to this record for a lot of night driving, when I can't put on something "drivey" and wake everyone else. There's just enough there to keep me going. And it's beautiful.


For more Sigur Ros, just look at their Wiki site and start from the albums I've mentioned. They work possibly best in sequential order, but in accessibility, I would rank them Takk...>Með suð>Ágætis>() or something like that. You then owe it to yourself to check out Jonsi's solo debut Go from April, 2010. This is one of the bigger songs from that.