Iceland's Sigur Ros Gave Me a Mild Case of Joy

Somewhere over Halifax? Over nowhere, North Atlantic? Suddenly excitable on sedatives, popping up and down on my cushion like a wind-up cymbal chimp, I demo the chicken dinner, pushing most of it onto Rory's already-stained lap, and I (even though they still give you a plastic knife on the plane, no matter what the tv says) finger out the soft breadmeat inside the fossilized bun, and pinch the bolus between my cheek and gum. In-flight entertainment clamped to skull, Belinda Carlisle, ooh heaven is a place, I know cuz I just flew out of there, winch the dial back over to the Albinoni's Baroque sobfest, back and forth, back and forth, bounce bounce bounce.

Air hostesses, stern and pretty in their navy blue Icelandair pinnies, approach gingerly, fore and aft. Ladies, haven't you seen air joy? It's me and Rory versus U.S. customs at JFK in a little over four hours, with a carry-on that's clinking with cigarette lighters, smoked fish, dead nips of high-octane caraway schnapps, jars of cheap caviar, and I've got the joy. Rory has the sadness.

A couple of days ago, three hours of hard road northeast of Reykjavik, sitting on the hood of our wee Toyota rental, parked at the foot of a glacier in the clearest air I've ever wheezed, we vowed that next time, whenever we came back to Iceland, which would be soon, soon, we'd be full-on geotourists: Rory would rent a lumbering Isuzu Patrol, one with tires that could turn your average SUV into a sardine can, and we'd head straight for the plentiful Icelandic hinterland. Halogen lamps to beat back the aggressive Icelandic fog. Herring burger in one hand and a stick shift in the other. We would run over ecosystems. We would run over ecotourists.

"Dude, did you just regurgitate?"

There's a thick white string of rubbery saliva swaying from Rory's lower lip to the rim of the coffee cup toppled on his tray. "You don't want to look at that," he says wistfully. The twinkle in his eye looks painted on.

Airplane hours pass, maybe. Something else Rory said, when we were dead-reckoning it back into Reykjavik after the glacier trip, zero visibility: "To understand Sigur Ros, you need to understand...fog." Taciturn, sooo 90s, opaque but not there, blessed with a landscape that collides the American red rock West with the Sea of Tranquillity, snuggy in its euphoric melancholia that seems so right for whatever now is, vanguard to a degree that my gaping mortality increases exponentially when I am exposed to it. That's Iceland, and damn if that ain't Sigur Ros too.

The Icelandic hometown heroes were the early climax of the third annual Iceland Airwaves music festival. The Listasafn Reykjavikur couldn't have been a better venue for Sigur Ros: a long, dim, white nave of a hall with a broad stage hazily lit by footlights, down near the docks of the harbor and packed with many respectful people of just about every hack nationality in the West?primarily tall, affectionate Danish and Icelandic females, noisy and sure in their high heels, groping their friends, laughingly searching their persons for their ringing mobile phones, and yawning English and Americans of any gender. Halfway through the set, when keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson cued the hit single, "Svefn-g-englar" via the slow, echoey plips of water droplets, the crowd applauded and began to sway in earnest.

It's not a big deal to applaud and sway in earnest, I know, but "Svefn-g-englar" is more than 10 minutes long and it's an international hit of powerless pop. You hear it and you love it and know it like it's a four-minute number-one-with-a-bullet single by your favorite band ever. No matter that "Svefn-g-englar" has gossamer, floaty lyrics that only the Norse can understand semantically, or that one of the song's hooks is a maybe-English refrain that sounds like "it's you," sung breathily by Jon Birgisson, Sigur Ros' guitarist/vocalist, whose voice is castrati high and pure.

The other hook in the song is a dreamy, heavy bridge that wrenches down into the softness via Birgisson's Les Paul, which he bows a la Jimmy Page, but I wouldn't tell him that. When he lifts the guitar to his face and sings into its pickups, when drummer Orri Dyrason stands at his kit and lays down a barbiturated slave-ship beat, when bassist Georg Holm gongs away against it all, these skinny, asexual guys, slouched and unlit on the stage, become big stars. It's pretty evident that Sigur Ros has arrived at cock rock through the back door.

I wouldn't tell them that either. They don't blab to the press, trying to explain their songs, they don't strut, and as of this writing they don't sell out to soda and car ads, either. On their website, they posted an apology to New York fans after their Beacon Theater show in late September. Apparently the venue turned on the lights immediately after the band left the stage at the end of the set. Come on, union plebes: the people need time to gently digest the aural feast they have just partaken of and ugly house lights are not part of the Sigur Ros ambience. The band was angry at the venue's insensitivity. "We thought it was just plain rude. We really wanted to come back on the stage and say thank you." But they didn't. Sigur Ros recently shunned Letterman, because they didn't have enough time to play. That is to say, Letterman couldn't give their long songs enough time on the air. Sigur Ros songs need time to bloom. There will not be a "Svefn-g-englar" radio edit. Isn't their attitude as refreshing as a cold-filtered draft in a mountain stream? As cool as your ass in a Toyota parked by a glacier? Absolutely.

Okay. I've listened to Agætis byrjun, their second album (it was released on an Icelandic label in '99, and Fat Cat, a UK label, rereleased it a year later), many many times. It's seamless and lush and lovely, I barely notice it anymore, except that new passages come to the foreground of my somewhat limited consciousness every time I play it. Dazzling piano lines. Sudden spurts of harmonica and skiffle beats. Thoughtful guitar heroism. Sweeps of dream galleons and oceanic melody that kick Daniel Lanois-era U2 in the bum. Lyrics that stink of longing even though I can't understand a word. But I can understand! Now I know how Hectare, my amorous midget acquaintance from a 16-sibling stinkhole in Brindisi, feels when he sings along retardedly to Madonna's "Live to Tell": Eee know ware boooty wiiivs!

I stand in the center of the living room at a kind of singed attention when Agætis byrjun is on, sort of like what I do in the supermarket: a lost and frozen fugue in the aisles. Agætis byrjun is veggie market muzak. Almost. No, it's better than that. Although "Svefn-g-englar" is a swell hit single, it's the album, played in its entirety, that brings about a state of pleasing, constructive meta-wakefulness that I used to only enjoy on self-prescribed Ritalin.

"Viorar vel til loftarasa," one of the prettiest songs on the album, finds a somber piano melody emerging out of a fading metallic subway shriek. The tune is redolent of many faded things, it's like an extra-long and extra-good "Bitter Sweet Symphony" without the aggravation and pleathery agenda of the Verve. Sentimental without the schmaltz, it would be a perfect score for a hopeful chick period piece. But Sigur Ros are out to take the piss and not put a teary-eyed American face close up.

They shot a video for the song in Hvalfjördur, southwestern Iceland, and released it in early September. Sigur Ros went for the money shot here and tossed a little kiddie homoeroticism into the tureen. The story begins with a pale young boy sitting on a dock under a low gray sky, staring at a doll in his lap. An older man spies him and takes umbrage at the boy's choice of plaything. The man violently seizes the doll and tosses it away, and we see it drowning, dead-eyed, in the dark water. Little boy squeezes out tears, his cheek pressed to the wooden dock. The scene dissolves into a boys' soccer game shot under another threatening sky and after a winning goal is scored, two young teammates kiss passionately on the field, little pink tongues and all. Birgisson's guitar roars orgasmically as the boys roll in the grass in their kissing reverie, and when the song disintegrates into a cacophony of strings the boys are torn apart and dragged away by two older men. Two little dolls fly into the air as the video ends.

I could go on about how the oldsters of Reykjavik, potato-faced, wrinkled, impeccably dressed in their ill-fitting finery, shrinking both in stature and in numbers, grimace and look away when Ugly American grins at them on the sidewalk. With downturned mouths they go back to feeding the swans. There's a wallet wad of Rory's Icelandic kronur on my person and no reason not to smile. I've got a mild case of the joy. And then there's the teeming brigades of gorgeous young'uns, half-gay, half-proud to live on the debt-inebriated volcanic turd that is home, pram-pushing their apple-faced babes down the Hverfisgata, Subway sandwich in one hand and cellphone in the other, and they just love to talk in their careful English to American strangers. Boys in sweaty white buttondown shirts open to reveal bumpy chests roam the streets late at night, in pale packs, empty beer bottles in their hands, looking for a window to smash or, more likely, a fist to put their face in. Everyone, and I mean everyone, who was touchy-feely and pie-eyed and progressive and prosperous was at the Sigur Ros concert on Oct. 18.

Right. Well. The symbolism is rife, riveting and strictly O-level. You get it: Hey teacher, leave us pretty boys alone, and all 12 of you macho old people watching this video and pumping your fists to the delicate sounds of Sigur Ros, you'd best be running scared. Wherever you are.