Epic Pop Awe!

When his bandmates went off and had babies, Sigur Rós’ frontman Jónsi saw the perfect opportunity to do the solo album he’d planned for years. The resulting record is staggeringly great and stunningly pop.

Standing watching Jón “Jónsi” Þór Birgisson’s waifish frame being photographed in the Reykjavik snow for The Fly covershoot, it makes total sense that this is where Sigur Rós’ music was born – in the distance, the Akrafjall and Esja mountains cast an imposing, gigantic presence over the coastline and the horizons stretch on, well, as long as most Sigur Rós songs, making it little wonder that they’ve constantly made music that dwarves them. Iceland’s population, after all, is a tiny speck next to its ominously overbearing landscapes. BUT that’s Sigur Rós – where the hell did Jónsi’s solo album come from? A record of stunningly concise, stompingly thrilling epic-pop, only two of ‘Go’’s nine songs cross the five-minute mark, the point at which Sigur Rós are just about to get going, and, in its opening double-blow of ‘Go Do’ and ‘Animal Arithmetic’, it possesses two songs accelerating with such dramatic urgency that Usain Bolt would struggle to keep up with them. All of which may come as a surprise – Sigur Rós, after, are a band whose career has been characterised by the sort of slow-burning sonic beauty that’s enabled critics to turn to their geography textbooks whenever they want to describe them – have you ever a Sigur Rós review that doesn’t get glacial? – but now here’s their frontman making music fit for the FM airwaves. If side-projects are exclusively reserved for the weird outtakes your band won’t let you indulge in, then on ‘Go’, Jónsi turns the whole thing on its head with monumentally euphoric results. “I had this in my head for a long, long time and I finally did it. The songs are written in a long time period, many years. When I started it, I had 30 songs to choose from and scaled it down to this,” he says, his English good, but lent a vulnerable tone by his Icelandic accent. We’re sitting in a hotel bar just outside of Reykjavik’s city centre. Well, we say city centre, but when yours truly, Fly photographer Tom Oldham and Jónsi’s press officer go traipsing round it later, it feels a little like we’ve got the whole place to ourselves. Hustle and bustle are alien concepts here, you feel. The lethargic pace hasn’t exactly rubbed off on one of its most famous exports, though  Sigur Rós may have been either touring, recording or both for the best part of a decade, but Jónsi’s found the time over the past couple of years to carve out a new batch of songs and release two solo albums – the first, a low-key collaboration with his partner Alex Somers titled ‘Riceboy Sleeps’, was released in summer 2009.
“We did ‘Riceboy Sleeps’ and we had that kind of planned out before this album, basically,” he explains. “We had been writing music together since we met so we released that and then I was also working on this album when I was doing the other one, then everybody in Sigur Rós had babies, so it was perfect timing for me to do stuff on my own.”
What the break gave, erm, birth to, was a record that noone, not even Jónsi himself, saw coming. Songs that had been written on ukulele (‘Go’), harmonium (‘Grow Till Tall’) or piano (‘Tornado’) were reworked and rearranged with Phillip Glass protégé and Grizzly Bear collaborator Nico Muhly, emerging as different beasts. Jónsi, to his shock, was making pop songs. Pop songs with big fucking string sections and incomprehensible lyrics (he might be singing in English this time, but it’s not always easy to work out what he’s singing), of course. “I remember, when I came from the studio from the first session, I was like, ‘shit, this is a crazy pop album – what have I done?!’,” he laughs. “A lot of this is definitely more pop, it’s more voice-orientated. It’s got the same mixing man who mixed Amy Winehouse so there was a focus on the voice. It’s different for me.” If on Sigur Rós’ otherworldly soundscapes, Jónsi sounds like he’s recording the vocals from the bottom of a very deep cave, here, his fragile, mesmerising voice takes centrestage as all manner of instruments swirl around him; indeed, one of the most remarkable things about ‘Go’ is that, apart from Jónsi’s voice, there’s no one main instrument; string sections swoop in from on high, drums are attention-demanding one minute and absent the next, guitars, bass and piano buried deep within the hurricane. Even more astoundingly, it all makes complete sense – Jónsi attributes Muhly as the man who found order in the chaos. “It took shape when I went to the studio in April,” he says. “I kind of had no prepared ideas with how I wanted it to sound, cos my first reaction was it would be a quiet slow acoustic album, then it turned out to something kind of completely different. Nico came and did his string parts. He brought his crazy arrangements, really colourful and playful, then Samuli (from fellow Icelandics múm) the drummer came and did his drum parts. Me and Nico met before that and did some arrangement together and then he took it away and fine-tuned it and made it sound really good. It was a spontaneous and creative atmosphere, it was really fun. It was different to how I thought it would turn out, but I think because I went into the studio with no expectations and it was spontaneous. Nobody expected anything from this, nobody knew I was gonna do something so there was no pressure. It was a really fun process, actually.” Rather than Jónsi being uber-precious about songs he’d built up over the years, he was more than happy to place them in the hands of Muhly, as well as fellow co-producers Alex and Peter Katis, and watch them march into grander, more expansive territory. “They had been hibernating for so long, these songs, it was nice to see them wake up and being born and doing something properly, because I’d only been noodling around in my living room with my acoustic guitar and piano and harmonium,” he says. “It was nice to see them take flight. It was healthy. And also, working with such amazingly clever and talented people, it was healthy for me, too.” Cleverness doesn’t good music make, though, and it’s the themes of simplicity running through ‘Go’, from its title to the lyrics to the song structures, that allows the songs to truly flourish. “I really don’t like clever music,” Jónsi opines. “Most of the energetic and thought-out elements are maybe the string arrangements and the drums, but they perform it effortlessly and spontaneous – it’s really important. It surprised me when I was working with Nico, he’s such a good arranger but he works so quickly and so fast and he’s super spontaneous and creative. It surprised me, I thought that was really cool.” That ‘Go’ flows in such a beautifully hypnotic manner is a testament to its brilliance. It’s a record to lose yourself in, where the standouts are one after the other after the other. The double-blow opening salvo sets out its stall; ‘Go Do’ is an ADD-juggernaut (“full on, but still dreamy,” says Jónsi), a microcosm of the skyscraping surges to come, and ‘Animal Arithmetic’ whiteknuckle, ramraiding stomp-pop that, in its repeated verse line of “Everyone, everything’s full of life”, manages to encapsulate the human warmth at ‘Go’’s heart. The intention is obvious – the opening of ‘Go’ should grab the listener by the balls. “Yeah, and also have it a little bit different from Sigur Rós’ style in some ways. A little bit like a bomb drop in your face. Like power and… it’s quite poppy. It’s intentional.” The record doesn’t actually stop to take a breath until three songs in, just at the point it takes the listener’s away – the achingly plaintive glide of ‘Tornado’ is, to these ears, the best thing Jónsi’s ever done. Beginning like a distant, melancholic cousin of Radiohead’s ‘Pyramid Song’, orchestral waves wash over and build it to a climactic outro that shows a suspenseful restraint – restraint isn’t exactly a word you’d associate with Sigur Rós. “It’s true,” says Jónsi, “usually people are waiting for an explosion. ‘Tornado’ is quite recent, and was written on piano. I’m quite bad at playing the piano. There’s one chord I can play with both my hands, so it’s the same, it’s all played like that. It has a special mood. It’s dramatic.” ‘Tornado’ sets a benchmark that, amazingly, the rest of ‘Go’ manages to live up to; the palatial waltz of ‘Boy Lilikoi’, ‘Sinking Friendships’’ harmonious twinkling and the adrenaline drum marches of ‘Around Us’ (“the teenage gay anthem!” a giggling Jónsi jokes) are celestial, indelible masterpieces. The graceful strings that guide ‘Hengilas’ to the album’s mountain-top finale, meanwhile, are mesmeric, making ‘Hoppipola’ sound about as life-affirming as Little Man Tate. Not that his Sigur Rós bandmates would know, however – when I enquire as to what they made of his solo album, or if they came down to the studio, he shakes his head matter-of-factly. “It’s all good. We’ve been together for 16 years – it’s a really long time. We’ve done a lot, toured the world over and released a lot of albums. I really, really love that band – I’m not gonna stop seeing them or playing with them. Between my touring, we’re gonna write this year and come back here and keep writing with them. It’d be amazing if we can do an album in 2011.” First though, there’s the small matter of a world solo tour to contend with, as well as some specially-designed costumes (“the gay man comes out in me with costumes and stuff like that – everybody loves dressing up secretly!” he laughs), the shows promise to feature a stage set and projections, designed by 59 Productions, unlike anything seen before at a gig. “For many years, the guys in Sigur Rós, we’ve always been interested in having a show, a concert, to stimulate more senses, not only the hearing – something for the eyes, to add to the experience,” Jónsi explains. “I always wanted to take it out of the rock’n’roll genre – the smoke machine and the Las Vegas lights. When the manager showed me this theatre play 59 Productions had done – this fresh approach to visual experiences, I thought it was really exciting. I kind of don’t know what to expect. My idea was also that, hopefully – there’s so much magic in theatres, more than bands, hopefully if we could bring some kind of more magic and imagination into the concert experience.“
Expect to be wowed – Jónsi will light up 2010.

‘Go’ is released on Parlophone on April 5th.