Studying For The Sigur Rós Midterm

Some bands/artists are really intimidating to get into. Sometimes it's because of their extensive back catalog (like Bob Dylan), others is because of the amount of musical ground they cover (Bowie), and perhaps because an artist has put out some sketchy albums (The Kinks, Brian Wilson). These are artists that usually can't be confined to a 1 Disc best of, and who wants to buy a best of collection anyways? Personally, it makes me feel really lame, and it's usually the record label's idea of what "the hits" are so it's usually less than satisfying. (Side note: I would think that iTunes and Amazon would make best ofs obsolete by now, but with these NOW compilations still selling millions of albums, most of America does not agree with me.)

The one band that I'm having trouble getting into is Sigur Ros. They don't have the most extensive catalog and they're not genre jumpers, they're just Icelandic. I'm not racist towards people of Icelandic descent or their music (still loving Bjork). Sigur Ros doesn't sing in English (well it's very rare) and only one of their song titles are in English, which makes it extremely hard to identify their songs. I have tickets to their concert in a couple of weeks and I'd like to be familiar with what they're going to play beforehand, like I would for any concert. I think with a Sigur Ros, with their 10 minute opuses, it's pretty essential.

I perused the band's message board and found their setlists for this tour. Because I am not privvy to the Icelandic language, I could not tell off the top of my head if I had a good majority of these songs in my musical library so deducing what songs I needed to buy from iTunes became a difficult chore: copy song title from message board, paste song title into my iTunes library to see if I already had it, if not, copy song title to iTunes store to buy song. Usually this process is much more basic. It's looking at the song titles and knowing if I had them or not, there wouldn't be a need to copy, paste, or even look in my library. Luckily for me, the songs I didn't have all came from one album, saving me money, but not really saving me any time.

You might wonder why I'm going to this concert if I'm not a diehard fan who already knows all their songs. It's because I know that they're an amazing band to watch in concert. They've made my sister cry (or possibly crygasm). I've liked what I've heard from them (I did own 3 albums of theirs before doing this extensive research). I just haven't been crazy enough to learn their language and the song titles. I'm sorry I don't remember Viðrar Vel Til Loftárása off the top of my head or that I have no idea what that means. I've oraganized a playlist on my iPhone of the songs they've been playing and I've been getting familiar with them. I might even be able to tell you what song is playing in a really butchered way, like "ooh they're playing Sagglepuss" (Sæglópur).

I might not be singing along with the songs at the show, but I think I've done enough studying up to thoroughly enjoy the show, as long as they don't stray too far from what they've been playing so far. I don't think I ever studied this hard in college, actually. Here's to hoping I ace my test in Poseur 101.